Dead Sea

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

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

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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.

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

H
eritage 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.