Dead Sea Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Challenger

  Deep

  Bottle

  Liberty

  Tuvalu

  Fears

  Calm

  Rage

  Run

  News

  Flight

  Dock

  Ghost

  Un

  Humpback

  Johnston

  Dagupan

  Flags

  Convenience

  Professor

  Wreck

  House

  Spray

  Measures

  Out

  Debris

  Shoals

  Mess

  American Gambit

  English Defence

  Endgame

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  THE FIRE SHIP

  THE COFFIN SHIP

  POWERDOWN

  THUNDER BAY *

  TITAN 10 *

  WOLF ROCK *

  RESOLUTION BURNING *

  CAPE FAREWELL *

  THE SHIP BREAKERS *

  HIGH WIND IN JAVA *

  BENIN LIGHT *

  RIVER OF GHOSTS *

  VOLCANO ROADS *

  THE PRISON SHIP *

  RED RIVER *

  ICE STATION *

  DARK HEART *

  DEAD SEA *

  * available from Severn House

  DEAD SEA

  A Richard Mariner Adventure

  Peter Tonkin

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  First published in the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Tonkin.

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

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tonkin, Peter.

  Dead sea.

  1. Mariner, Richard (Fictitious character)-Fiction.

  2. Mariner, Robin (Fictitious character)-Fiction.

  3. Lottery tickets-Fiction. 4. Marine pollution-

  Fiction. 5. Pacific Ocean-Fiction. 6. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-361-7 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8231-8 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Cham, Guy and Mark,

  As always.

  And to the staff and students of Combe Bank School,

  many of whom helped with the creation of this story

  and some of whom are in it.

  Acknowledgements

  Dead Sea began when I joined The Ecologist and was sent a copy of Mark Lynas’ High Tide. This sparked interest in the Pacific and in Tuvalu. Interest which was piqued by reports of ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ that began to surface at once. I turned immediately to Brian Dunning’s essential Skeptoid website which explained the actual state of the so called ‘garbage patch’. My son, Guy, completing a dissertation on the effect of ecological writing on current American literature, then recommended Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. Both Mr Lynas and Professor Weisman were kind enough to answer my contacts and their work has influenced the story as it has turned out; though the ‘garbage patch’ as it appears in the closing chapters, and what happens to it in the end, are based on my brother Simon’s experiences as RAF press-liaison officer during the Piper Alpha disaster.

  The ‘garbage’ question was made more interesting by the news reports of wreckage from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 still drifting across the North Pacific, and, in particular, of the fate of the Ryou-Un Maru. Other books that influenced the final outcome of Dead Sea were Paul Brown’s Global Warming, and Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck, the latter particularly because Mr Hohn sailed from Hawaii to the area and dived in it, searching for the garbage.

  For once I did not need to approach the Chart and Pilot division of Kelvin Hughes – a long-term standby in nautical matters – for I had the relevant pilots as well as the Rough Guides to all the land-based sections of the story. And I had the Internet. Google Earth allowed me to research every location from Tuvalu to French Frigate Shoals in the finest detail. Detail only rivalled by Mary Gostelow’s Girlahead website which took me into the most exclusive recesses of the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, and, through ‘The Gal’s’ experiences, allowed me to learn how to get a PhD in Sushi. Once again, ‘The Gal’ was kind enough to reply to my contact and her adventures became Richard’s.

  Liberty’s vessel Flint is based on Plastiki, a vessel made of plastic bottles which has actually sailed across the North Pacific. Liberty herself, as with one or two other characters, has been constructed during a series of negotiations with students at Combe Bank School as part of a project to show how literature can be interactive as well as the result of an individual view. I must also thank two advisors to whom I turn when I need hands-on advice about sailing. Thank you Mike Higgins and Peter Halsor. Every tack and gybe the girls make correctly is down to you. Every mistake is down to me. Finally I must thank my brother Simon and my wife Cham who read and advised at every stage of writing. I really could not have done it without you.

  Peter Tonkin, Tunbridge Wells and Sharm El Sheikh

  Challenger

  Heritage Mariner’s exploration vessel Poseidon sat at three one point three degrees north and one four five point zero degrees east in the sweltering heat of a North Pacific midsummer noon. The adapted corvette was precisely positioned, facing eastwards, her slim cutwater slicing through the lazy swells, eighteen hundred miles due east of her last port of call, Shanghai, and four miles vertically above the northernmost reach of the Marianas Trench.

  For the moment, the Pacific was living up to its name. Long deep-water rollers surged gently westwards and perhaps only a master mariner like Richard Mariner himself would have noted the slight steepening of the westward-rolling waves as they came counter to the relentless swirl of the currents just below them, where the North Equatorial Current turned back on itself and joined the Kuroshio Current which flowed up the coasts of China and Japan before turning and running east.

  Richard, or his captain, Captain Chang, had orders to hold her command dead-still at the confluence of these restlessly conflicting forces, while Poseidon’s owners went about the business which had brought them here.

  Poseidon could have been Coleridge’s painted ship idling upon a painted ocean. Given only that a modern artist would have had to add to the picture
a number of twenty-first-century details. The bustle of the scientific teams on the foredeck between the gantries that reached out over the ocean to port and starboard. The group of ethnic Han seamen standing listlessly, angling off the square stern in the diminishing shadow of the helicopter up on its landing pad, waiting for the watch to change. And, perhaps most importantly, the fact that their fishing lines reached down into the lazily departing waves past a widespread slick of partially decomposing plastic junk.

  It was this slowly disintegrating rubbish, among other things, which had brought Richard east from Heritage House in London. This, and the thick, poisonous, plastic soup that lay trapped in the currents beneath. For the foredeck gantries – and the groups of scientists and engineers busy between them – had carried two of the most advanced deep-water exploration vessels on the planet and the powerful men who owned them. And lowered them over the side two hours ago on a mission to discover how deep this deadly Sargasso of rotting detritus sank.

  The air was so still that even the tattered plastic bags, decaying bottles, silver-sided chip and crisp packets lay at rest among the speckles of oil tar and little drifts of Styrofoam bobbing against Poseidon’s cutwater, and the Heritage Mariner house colours drooped at the jackstaff on the forepeak, almost covering the Greenbaum International pennant hanging just below. Both colours were flying not only because the deep-sea exploration vessel was one of several cooperatively funded by both huge business enterprises, but because the men who controlled those enterprises were both aboard. Not only Richard Mariner but also Nic Greenbaum. Well, thought Richard, as the slight rocking movement of Poseidon’s hull was transmitted to him through the back and seat of the control chair into which he was wedged, not strictly aboard, perhaps. Certainly not mentally. Mentally, Richard was down in the experimental remote exploration vehicle Neptune, while his old friend and associate Nic Greenbaum was in control of Salacia, Neptune’s even more experimental sister. Neptune and Salacia were easing themselves side by side down towards the upper reaches of the abyssal trench, three miles beneath Poseidon’s hull. The broad beams of the lights with which the vehicles were festooned probed the inky darkness of the deepest ocean reaches. At the moment, they illuminated little besides each other for, from the surface down, it seemed that this part of the ocean was as dead and deserted as the still sky above it. Every flash of early colour and later movement had turned out to be some shard of rubbish, some sliver of plastic, trapped at the confluence of the mighty currents swirling purposefully around them.

  During the two hours of the dive so far, the sunlight in the upper waters and the halogen lights further down had shown far less life and far more rubbish than either Richard or Nic had expected. One or two schools of lean tuna, three or four cruising sharks, but all around, sloping down the sunbeams, seemingly endless curtains of plastic fragments, undulating lazily like the flakes in a world-sized Christmas snow globe.

  Richard half-expected to see Santa or a Snowman towering somewhere behind the restless blizzard. But as they had explored deeper and deeper, with no apparent lessening of the glittering whiteout, his festive thoughts had darkened and his open face had folded into an ever-deepening frown. Even at a thousand metres down, Salacia seemed to come and go as the polluted water thickened and thinned around her. Things had not improved, in fact, until the vessels hit the real deeps more than two thousand metres down, where the icy waters set up thermal barriers as impenetrable as strata layers in rock formations, and the currents of the upper ocean became irrelevant.

  While Richard knew the workaday outlines of the crablike Neptune perfectly, he was constantly struck by the futuristic beauty of her younger sister. Salacia was an elongated teardrop of the most indestructible crystals, toughened glasses and tempered alloys available. Where Neptune gathered her lights, arms, cameras and propulsion systems all beneath a roughly circular carapace designed to protect her more delicate parts from the unimaginable pressures of the deep, Salacia appeared to have the gossamer vulnerability of a jellyfish. Her bow section seemed to be one big drop of unbreakable crystal; the rest of her – lights, arms, propulsion and all – arrayed around and behind that one unwinking, silvery eye, like the tendrils of a Portuguese Man of War.

  And yet, as Richard was well aware, the appearance of fragility was utterly misleading. Salacia was an extension of the Chinese Jialong deep-sea exploration programme which had already sent men more than seven thousand metres deep. She was designed to go where even Neptune could not venture – down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. A place visited by very few: by Piccard and Walsh in 1960, and by James Cameron in 2012. A place apparently as dead at seven miles down as the plastic poisoned surface was above.

  And somewhere in between the two marine deserts sat the two deep-sea exploration vessels with almost nothing to observe except each other. The screens in front of Richard showed much more than Salacia’s picture etched against the glittering blackness all around her. They gave full-spectrum analysis of everything anywhere near Neptune herself – thermal imaging; 3D broad-spectrum sonar modelling of the ocean bed towards which they were easing so carefully, temperatures, pressures, and, crucially, depths. ‘Just coming past four thousand metres now,’ Richard rumbled, his gaze flickering steadily over the range of familiar readouts. He lifted his right hand briefly off the control to adjust the micro-mic at his throat and ease the earphones slightly. ‘Seabed another thirty-five hundred metres below . . .’

  ‘Three thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven,’ observed Nic’s precise Boston tones in Richard’s head. ‘Yes, I see. I think Salacia’s readouts are more accurate than yours.’

  ‘I was just rounding up,’ countered Richard easily. ‘The seabed immediately below us is only the upper edge of a cliff in any case. The cliff foot is another . . .’

  ‘One thousand, six hundred and nine metres down. Yes. I see,’ drawled Nic. ‘Five thousand and forty-six metres to the ocean bed itself. Looks like we’re just under halfway there . . .’ Like Richard, the tenser things got, the slower he talked and the faster he thought.

  ‘And that’s only the start of the trench,’ observed Richard. ‘It gets deeper pretty quickly the further south you go.’

  ‘The gates of hell. Yeah. “Abandon hope all ye . . .”’

  ‘What’s that?’ Richard interrupted his friend’s quotation, his voice suddenly showing some of the tension that he actually felt.

  Out of the blackness swam the largest jellyfish Richard had ever seen. It arrived unannounced because it was so diaphanous that the sonar pulses passed right through it as though it was made of the water that surrounded it. None of the other systems registered it either. It was so much a thing of the element it inhabited that it registered no movement, showed no heat signature, gave out no light signal. It may well have had sections or patterns of luminosity, as many deep-water life forms did, but they had been overwhelmed by the glare of the two deep-sea vessels’ lights. It suddenly appeared, therefore, disturbingly abruptly, ghostlike, and almost shockingly identical to Salacia.

  The huge silvery bell of its body must measure almost three metres across, thought Richard. And the tentacles trailing after it must reach nearly forty metres back, though the shadow behind it made accuracy difficult. ‘You registering this?’ he asked Nic.

  ‘Yup.’

  With a weary pulse of its enormous body, the gigantic jellyfish pulled itself closer to Salacia, as though hoping it had found a companion in the midst of this massive emptiness.

  ‘I think she likes you,’ Richard observed. He swung Neptune easily inwards, closer to the cruising monster.

  ‘Don’t disturb her,’ ordered Nic. ‘It’s our first date. We’re just getting acquainted . . .’

  Richard glanced up at the series of monitors above Neptune’s display, which gave Salacia’s point of view. It was exactly as though Nic’s vessel was staring into a looking glass, he thought. Then he eased back as Nic pushed Salacia forward gently, the two colossal silvery bubbles – on
e of strengthened glass and the other of watery jelly – seeming to close towards each other like reflections coming together in a massive mirror. The pressure down here was passing four thousand atmospheres, he thought, double-checking the readouts. How could a life form apparently as fragile as spun glass possibly exist?

  ‘You any idea what she is?’ enquired Nic.

  ‘Looks like a Lion’s Mane to me,’ Richard answered. ‘Lion’s Mane jellyfish are supposed to be the biggest and I can’t imagine anything much bigger than this. But I thought they stayed up in the Arctic. It’s pretty rare to see one this far south. Maybe . . .’ His voice tailed off as he became lost in thought.

  ‘Yeah?’ prompted Nic. ‘Maybe . . .?’

  ‘The north polar icecap is still melting, even if the Antarctic seems to be gaining ice again,’ said Richard slowly. ‘Maybe the meltwater from the Arctic Ocean is pushing creatures like this one further south. Setting up new currents in the deep ocean . . .’

  ‘It’s a theory.’ Nic didn’t sound particularly convinced but he fell silent and Richard eased Neptune closer to the jellyfish. Her lights probed the darkness behind the huge creature, showing a forest of trailing tendrils reaching away into blue-black shadow. And more. Richard was suddenly frowning almost thunderously and swearing under his breath. For tangled in the huge creature’s tentacles was a massive section of drift net. Orange cable – an indestructible mixture of polypropylene and Kevlar – led to two big orange plastic floats separated by fat tubes of Styrofoam. The orange balloons squashed flat by the pressure, but the Styrofoam somehow still holding its shape. Behind this billowed the better part of sixty square metres of indestructible orange fishing net – complete with the rotting corpses and skeletons of whatever the net had been set to catch. No wonder the huge jellyfish seemed to be pulling itself so wearily through the water.

  With hardly a second thought, Richard sent Neptune further back along the huge creature’s tentacles, already unfolding the mechanical arms, calculating the most effective way of cutting the netting free. He had no idea whether the jellyfish could feel any pain near its extremities, and if so how it would react to even a well-intentioned attempt to cut the jetsam free. At worst it would simply make a run for it. But Neptune and Salacia could both outrun it easily. So, with any luck . . .