Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

On the calm, mirror surface of the sea, the boat was unnaturally still.

‘Shall we try and pull in the net, Skip?’ asked Ian.

‘Yeah, but go gently… I don’t want any more damage done if it can be helped.’

Ian reached for a lever beside the base of the starboard outrigger and pulled it down. With a clunk and a rattle the motor on the hydraulic winch whirred to life and began winding in the net. Jeff watched the fibres of the net begin to stretch and the winch’s motor began to struggle.

‘It’s not coming in,’ shouted Ian above the noise. He looked at Jeff and placed a hand back on the lever, ready to put the motor out of its misery.

‘Nope. Damned thing’s snagged. Shut it off.’

The lad slammed the lever down and the motor on the hydraulic winch sputtered and died.

Jeff was looking at losing a hundred-dollar net if he didn’t play his cards right. A hundred-dollar net, four days of cruising diesel, the cost of groceries for four hungry mouths… and a less than stellar haul on ice, below decks, to pay for it all.

It was getting too dark to see anything. ‘Tom!’ He barked towards the pilothouse. ‘Put on the floods.’

Twin beams bathed the aft deck with a powerful white light, and all of a sudden twin 1000-watt halogen bulbs obliterated the last, faint glow of dusk. It was officially night.

‘Whad’ya want to do, Skip?’ asked Duncan.

Good question.

Jeff headed back inside the pilothouse. He looked sternly at Tom and tapped the depth sounder display with his knuckles.

‘You been watching this, right?’

Tom nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘All the time, right?’

‘Uh, yeah. It’s been nothing but flat bed for the last hour, Skip.’

‘Yeah? Well obviously it hasn’t because we’ve snagged our nets on something, and it sure as hell ain’t cod.’

Tom’s jaw flapped ineffectively again, his Adam’s apple bobbed in sympathy.

‘Don’t say anything boy, or you’ll just piss me off even more. Put this boat in reverse and let’s retrace our steps.’

‘Sure, Skip.’

‘And this time keep your eyes on the sounder. Reckon you can do that for me?’

Tom nodded vigorously. Jeff left the pilothouse once more and found himself muttering under his breath yet again.

Somebody else can take his sorry ass out, next time.

Outside, Ian and Duncan were awaiting orders.

‘Okay, Ian… you’re on the winch. We’re going to carry on reversing, and I want the slack on the net pulled in as we go.’

The boat began to shudder again as the engine engaged reverse gear, and slowly they started backwards. Ian operated the winch, intermittently slamming it on and off to recover the net as the tension allowed, and Jeff studied the wet folds of braided nylon netting for damage as it slowly built up on the aft deck.

Ten minutes had passed when he heard Tom calling out from the pilothouse.

‘What is it?’ he shouted back.

‘I think you should see this, Skip. Not sure if I’m reading this right.’

Jeff threw down the net and started towards him.

So NOW he sees something.

Tom turned towards Jeff as he entered, and pointed towards the green glow of the sounder’s display.

‘I umm… didn’t notice that there before — ’

Jeff looked at the ghostly image on the display screen, a grainy rendition of the seabed in profile. Flat from left to right, but with an unmistakable spike building up on the extreme right.

‘Didn’t notice? How the hell did you not notice that!.. or maybe you just weren’t looking? That’s the shitting thing that’s going to ruin my net.’

‘I’m sorry, Skip… I just didn’t see it — ’

Jeff angrily waved a hand to shut him up. He studied the green screen as the spike slowly progressed towards the middle of the display. The spike was followed by another and then the line became a plateau at a new height for forty, fifty feet, then dipped back down again.

‘Stop the boat,’ Jeff ordered. Tom slammed the engine into neutral. Whatever that thing was, it was directly beneath them.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t spot that first time round,’ Jeff said, shaking his head with incredulity. Tom ashamedly lowered his gaze, anticipating another roasting. He knew he wouldn’t be going out on Jeff Westland’s boat again.

The door to the pilothouse swung open, and Ian entered. ‘The net’s not moving, Skip. I reckon we’re on top of whatever we’re caught on.’

Jeff nodded at the sounder display. ‘A wreck, I think, we’re sitting right over it. Genius here didn’t notice it.’

Tom’s cheeks turned crimson as Ian stared silently at him.

Overheads settled before shares paid out. That’s the way it worked. With the net totalled, the outrigger damaged, and the crappiest haul of the season on ice down below, Ian could see a lean fortnight ahead of him, until the Skip was ready to take his boat out again.

Tom realised he’d be best avoiding the bars in Port Lawrence for a while. At least until Ian and Duncan had been out again, and found themselves flush with money once more.

‘If we lose the net we lose the evening haul,’ Ian said bitterly.

‘Leave him be,’ said Jeff, ‘I’ve already spoken to him.’

Ian studied the display carefully, trying to comprehend the three-dimensional shape described by the two-dimensional profile on the screen.

‘Is that a shipwreck, Skip?’

‘Yeah. There’re no rocks out here. This section of the banks is nothing but sixty miles of flat silt. It’s just great I find the one shipwreck out here when my net’s down. Just fucking great.’

Ian continued to study the form on the sounder. It was fifty feet long and pretty flat, peaking at one end with a tall spike.

‘That’s a wreck all right, Skip. Reckon maybe that spike there’s a mast or something?’

Jeff looked closely. ‘Maybe.’

Tom pointed at the screen. ‘It doesn’t look like a ship.’

The other two turned to look at him.

‘I said I don’t think it’s a ship.’

‘Well, I don’t care whether it’s a ship, the body of Moby Dick or the lost city of Atlantis, the damn thing’s got my net and it’s going to chew it up pretty good before I get it back.’

Tom’s cheeks continued to burn under their withering gaze. But he knew that wasn’t the profile of a boat. It was obvious if you looked at it right.

‘So,’ said Jeff tiredly, the force of his anger spent leaving him feeling only exhausted resignation, ‘given that this is the seabed we’re looking at, if it’s not a ship, what the hell do you think it is?’

‘It’s a plane,’ said Tom with a voice he’d hoped would sound certain and confident, but in fact came out as little more than a whisper.

Chris Roland adjusted the arrangement of photographs on the table in the conference room. He had spent last night in his hotel room at the Marriott reviewing the contact sheets and from this he had carefully picked out several dozen of the most striking images. He’d developed and printed them in the en-suite bathroom through the early hours of this morning.

He was exhausted.

He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the glass partition walls that separated the conference room from the rest of News Fortnite ’s open-plan office. A tall and gaunt apparition stared back at him, his weather-tanned forehead at odds with the fish-belly white of his recently shaved chin and topped off with a marine buzz cut. Chris shook his head and smiled. He looked like the top half of his head had been zapped by a ray gun.

His coarse brown hair had grown long, and he’d developed a full beard while on the last assignment, a wildlife shoot on the island of South Georgia. He’d begun to look like one of those hairy geeks they wheel out from time to time to talk about the good old pioneering days of the computer industry. Guys who looked like they could do with a little help-me-out cash but whose handful of gratis Apple or Microsoft shares are worth billions.