There was the sound of a shot somewhere above them. They exchanged an uneasy glance, but said nothing. Then just above their heads there were footsteps, a great many of them. Goddard oriented himself with relation to the rest of the midships structure. The men would be going forward along the port side of the crew’s deck. They were still passing. Were they fleeing the fire? The smoke was growing worse. His throat and nostrils burned with it, and he was seized with a fit of coughing. The temperature must be more than a hundred and twenty degrees. Sweat ran into his eyes. The footsteps ceased, and there was silence except for the rushing sound of the fire.
‘They were going forward,’ Karen said. ‘Do you suppose it has started to spread?’
'I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But let’s get out of this trap while we can make it to the ladder. If we can.’
He motioned for her to wait while he leaped to the door and hopped from one foot to another as he looked down the passageway to his right. The ladder was half obscured by smoke now, and for half the distance this way the paint on the steel deck plates was bubbling. It would stick to their feet and take the skin off. He turned back to Karen.
‘Let me have the canvas,’ he said. ‘Sit there for a minute.’ He gestured to the door supporting Krasicki’s body in its burial sack. She perched on the edge of it and lifted her feet. He grabbed up the bolt of cloth and leaped back into the passageway. Holding one end, he threw it toward the ladder. It unrolled to within a few feet of it.
He ran down the strip and kicked the remainder of the bolt. He could feel his feet blistering as he bounded the remaining distance and leaped to the ladder treads. He could see no one above him. ‘All right,’ he called softly. Karen emerged and ran toward the ladder. He watched to see she made it all right, and went on up.
There was no one in the passageway, and no sound except that of the rain and the roaring and crackling noises of the fire. That was odd. She came up behind him. They looked at each other, puzzled. They could duck into the hospital, which was just forward of them, but the silence worried him. The doorway opening onto the after end of the deck was less than six feet from them, but nobody had passed it, and there were no footsteps or voices from the men fighting the fire. He gestured for her to stay where she was, tiptoed over to it, and peered out. There was nobody fighting the fire. There was nobody in sight at all.
He beckoned, and she slipped up beside him in the doorway. The fire roared on unchecked from number three hatch, flames and boiling black smoke blowing off to starboard now in the wind, and they could feel the searing waves of heat on their faces. The steel hatch coaming glowed a dull red, and the deck all around gave off waves of steam as the rain lashed across it and vaporized on contact. At each corner of the deck up here, next to the ladders, was an abandoned fire hose, no water at all coming from the nozzles.
‘If they’d abandoned ship,’ Karen said, ‘they’d have gone up. They were going forward.’
They wheeled and ran along the deserted passageway. The rooms and fo’c’s’les were all empty. At the forward end, beyond the thwartships passage, were two messrooms. They were empty too, but there were portholes along the forward bulkhead. They hurried into the second one and around the long single table. Slipping up to separate portholes, they peered out cautiously, and saw at once why nobody was fighting the fire.
The forward well-deck below them was full of men standing in the blown curtains of rain. They were staring aft in the attitudes of animals at bay, some up at the bridge and others apparently at someone or something on this deck and just off to the right of where they were. It was the whole crew, Goddard thought. At a rapid glance he picked out Barset, Mr. Pargoras, Svedberg, the second mate, Gutierrez, two of the engineers, several of the sailors he knew by sight, and even two of the black gang who must be on watch now, wearing singlets and sweat rags.
Karen had moved around with the left side of her face against the bulkhead, peering out as far to the right as she could. She stepped back, looked at Goddard, and stabbed a finger in that direction. He looked. Otto was standing just beyond them where he could cover both ladders, an automatic rifle propped on the rail in front of him.
He beckoned to Karen, and they slipped back out into the passage. Just as they emerged they heard a noise somewhere on the starboard side as though somebody had dropped a pail. There was an instant of silence, and then a groan Goddard slipped on to the corner, and peered down the starboard passageway. Ahead of him was an open cleaning-gear locker. Sprawled on his side in front of it was a man clad only in dungarees and slides, near his head the empty pail he had apparently dislodged from a shelf while trying to pull himself erect. Goddard beckoned to Karen and ran back to him. He knelt and turned him on his back.
It was Koenig, the AB who’d given him the sport shin. He had apparently been shot through the chest. Blood was all over his rib cage and abdomen, and on the deck, and more bubbled from his nostrils and trickled from the corner of his mouth. Karen winced and closed her eyes for an instant, but she picked up his legs while Goddard caught him by the shoulders and they got him into a lower bunk in the fo’c’s’le next door. Goddard turned his head and propped it on a pillow so he wouldn’t strangle, cursing silently because there was nothing else he could do. Even a surgical team couldn’t save him without several liters of blood. He’d lost too much, and was slipping into shock.
Goddard knelt beside him. ‘Who did it?’ he asked.
‘The bos’n.’ Koenig started to choke. Goddard turned him back on his side and snatched at part of the blue bedspread to wipe the blood from his mouth. He took a gasping breath. 'I tried to hide—in the locker. To get behind him—get the gun. I knew what they were going to do.’
‘What?’ Goddard asked.
Koenig gave no indication he had heard. His eyes closed, but he went on with his halting speech. He’d overheard Mayr and Lind speaking in German while the others were fighting the fire.
'I am German,’ he said, with another fight for breath. ‘Mayr was telling Lind what to do. Stop the fire pump—let her burn. Get a cutting torch from the engine room—wreck all the lifeboats except one. Send an SOS—with a phony position. Spivak—oiler—’ Koenig’s voice stopped.
‘What about Spivak?’ Goddard asked.
“In the engine room—opening the sea intakes.’
Goddard looked up at Karen. ‘Thirty men,’ she whispered. ‘Who could do it?’
‘Koenig.’ Goddard leaned close to him. ‘Koenig, can you hear me? You say Mayr was giving the orders. Was it military? You know—as if he were Lind’s superior officer?’
‘No.’ Koenig’s voice was barely audible. ‘It was worse. He is Lind’s father.’
That answered a lot of things, Goddard thought, including Karen’s question: Who could do it? Blood would tell. And it didn’t matter in the slightest how much, or whose.
Koenig’s eyes opened wide for an instant as though he were watching something terrible he was powerless to escape. Did you see it coming for you in those last few minutes, Goddard wondered, even when you were in shock? He was trying to speak again, but his voice was only a whisper, and Goddard had to lean down almost to his lips to hear. ‘Oh, God. Another one.’
13
The only thing they had going for them, Goddard thought, was that Lind didn’t know they were aboard. That wasn’t much, considering the time margin they were operating with. In a half hour, or perhaps less, the fire was going to spread into the shelter deck and come roaring up through the whole midships house. The engine room was being flooded, and while he didn’t know how fast it came in, you would reach a point of no return as soon as you could no longer get at the valves to stop it, and the pumps and the boiler fireboxes were flooded.