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.
Koenig was still fighting for life, his breathing a series of rattling gasps it was awful to hear and which couldn’t go on for more than a few minutes longer. They didn’t want to leave him, but he was already unconscious, and time was flying past them. Goddard nodded to Karen, and they went out and hurried aft along the passageway.
She shuddered once, and drew a hand across her face. Then she asked, ‘What can we do?’
'I want one of those guns,’ he said. His voice was calm, but when she looked around at him she saw in his eyes that same feral yearning they’d had there in Madeleine Lennox’ cabin before he went for Rafferty.
‘One gun? Against six of them?’ she asked.
They had reached the doorway opening onto the after deck. Opposite it was one of the steel doors into the engine room casing. He motioned for silence, stepped over, and quietly pulled it open a few inches. He peered in at the catwalks around the great mass of the main engine and the tracery of steel ladders leading down to the floor plates thirty feet below. On a grating halfway down where he could watch all the ladders was a man with a handgun shoved into the waistband of his dungarees. That would be Spivak, standing guard over the opened sea intakes. There was no way to reach him except down the ladders right in front of him. Scratch that one.
He looked down again. With the
He was thinking swiftly. The others? Lind, Mayr, the bos’n, and Karl would be on the boat deck, all armed, and only two of them, at most, busy cutting the bottoms out of the other three boats with the torch. Simple suicide. Lind alone, unarmed, could probably kill him with his bare hands. Otto? With a steel bulkhead behind him and fifty feet of open deck on each side, he was impregnable. And unless he was removed, they were all finished.
‘What could you do with a gun?’ she asked again. ‘Against all six of them?’
‘Kill Otto,’ he said.
She understood what he meant. They had to get the crew back here. Even if he could get into the engine room, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to shut off the sea intakes or start the fire pump, to say nothing of the fact he wouldn’t recognize either of them if he fell over them.
‘But as soon as they realize what Lind’s doing,’ she protested. ‘Otto won’t be able to keep them there.’
He could until it was too late, Goddard thought, but there wasn’t time to explain. They knew already. Of the thirty, Otto could stop only the first six or eight, but who was going to be in the first six or eight? Until he emptied his clip, nobody would get to the top of either of those ladders. That also meant the second wave had to climb over a ladder full of wounded men, with Lind and Mayr shooting straight down on top of them from the bridge.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The radio shack. I’ll only be a few minutes.’
He went up the inside companionway on the run, trying to visualize where the wireless room would be. The cage for the antenna lead-in was on the starboard side of the boat deck near the bridge, so it should be forward in the starboard passageway. He emerged into the thwartships passage of the officers’ deck and turned right, going softly now, and listening. As he turned the corner, he heard a noise ahead of him, but it wasn’t a radio receiver or the staccato chirping of continental morse; it sounded like a wrecking crew at work, metallic crashings and a
