Alex Scarrow: A thousand suns

He felt old. He certainly couldn’t face doing another ‘hot’ assignment. A year ago he’d done some work in northern Iraq for News Fortnite, documenting the appalling and bloody tit-for-tat killings between the Kurds and the Sunnis that was still going on even now, years after the second Gulf war. A few years ago he might have been able to dispassionately shut out the worst of it on this kind of field job, but that last one had finally got to him.

From now on, he would be happy to stay away from the hazardous stop-and-drop assignments like that. It was going to have to be terns and penguins, or he was going to have to find a new way to earn a living. The world was becoming too ugly a thing to study through his viewfinder.

‘So how long are you planning on staying out here?’ asked Mark, disturbing Chris’s woolgathering.

‘I don’t think we’ll need to be too long here. I can probably do the shoot in one dive if the water’s clear and we have a good day for the weather.’

‘The water here’s pretty cold this time of year. I’d say not far off zero degrees down below. It’ll have to be a short dive, no more than thirty minutes tops. You think you can get all that you want in that time, Chris?’

‘Well, if not, then we can do a second dive, I suppose.’

‘It’s been a while since we did any together. How are you with diving on wrecks? How many have you done?’

‘Only one… that time with you in Florida. When was that? Two

… three years ago?’

Mark looked a little unhappy. ‘Okay, so tonight we’ll go over the safety rules again. It seems like you could probably do with a refresher course. It’s a dangerous type of diving, especially with all the added complications of a cold-water environment. But then you know all this, don’t you?’

‘That’s why I hired you, mate. So you can do all the worrying and fussing.’

The last of the evening’s light was fading quickly as they entered Port Lawrence and parked up near the wharf.

It was a small fishing town, with a population of five and a half thousand. On Fridays and Wednesdays it pulled in people from all over the county for the market, and in the summer, townies came from as far away as Boston and New York to enjoy the odd long weekend of provincial charm. Outside of the vacation seasons and market days, it was a ghost town.

There was plenty of space to park along the wharf, and Chris rolled the Cherokee up beside several delivery trucks facing the wharf’s edge. He looked out of the windscreen at the row of trawlers tied up like horses outside a saloon bar.

Most of them were stripped down and tarped up for the winter. They would sit like that, not earning money for their owners for only a couple of months, the worst of the gale season, and be out on the sea again by the end of January.

The bigger boats headed out Nova Scotia way, towards the Grand Banks for trips that lasted four to six weeks. They were fifty- and sixty-foot Sword boats with crews of up to seven, which could sometimes bring in nearly sixteen tons of catch. They were mostly owned by cartels of investors, their skippers and crews on retainers and smaller shares.

The few smaller boats lined up were mostly independent operators that fished nearer home, boats that were owned or part-owned by their skippers and trawled only a few miles out from the coast, up and down the silt banks for only four or five days at a time. They couldn’t afford two months tied up, and fished pretty much all year round.

Chris and Mark climbed out and surveyed the boats.

‘I told you,’ said Mark. ‘You should have chartered from somewhere else. There’s no way we’re going to find a suitable boat down here.’

‘Yeah, looks like you might be right,’ Chris sighed reluctantly. He had gambled on finding a motor launch or a leisure boat. The place was a tourist town as well as a fishing port, after all.

It was going to have to be one of the smaller fishing boats. Halfway along the wharf he could see a single light mounted on the pilothouse of one of them.

‘There, that would do us. And it looks like someone’s home.’

Mark followed his gaze. ‘It’s a trawler, Chris, not some leisure cruiser. You’ll be lucky if they’ll take you out.’

‘I’m sure the rustling of a little dosh will help some.’

‘Dosh?’ asked Mark. ‘Money, right?’

Chris nodded.

Mark looked quizzically at him. ‘Just how much money do you get paid for this kind of assignment anyway?’

Chris smiled. ‘Enough, and then some… shall we go and charter us a trawler, then?’ He headed across the diesel-stained concrete of the wharf towards the solitary light without waiting for an answer.

Mark watched him go. ‘Enough and then some, eh?’ he muttered, and then he found himself grinding his teeth. Chris could be an annoyingly cocky punk sometimes.

‘Come on, mate,’ Chris called back.

Chris approached the trawler’s stern. ‘What time do you make it?’

Mark pushed up a sleeve, revealing a Rolex nesting in a luxuriant bed of dark forearm hair. ‘Seven-thirty.’

Chris leaned over and rapped his knuckles against the hull. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ he shouted. They heard some movement from inside the boat.

‘Jeeeez, Chris! You know how rude that is?’ Mark said.

‘What?… knocking on the boat? It’s not as if it’s got a doorbell.’

‘She’s a “she” not an “it”. All sea-going vessels are “shes”, okay? You don’t want to get the owner pissed before you start your shmoozing, huh?’

They heard the clunk of a bolt sliding, and a crack of light appeared on the foredeck as a hatch lifted a few inches. They could just make out the shine of a balding head framed by a thatch of grey whiskers.

‘Yes?’

Chris absent-mindedly swung the torch on him.

‘Hey! Get that goddamn thing out of my eyes!’

‘Sorry,’ he said sheepishly. He flicked it off.

‘Whad’ya want?’

‘Hi, we’re looking to hire a boat for a day, maybe two days. Yours looks like it won’t sink if we untie it.’

Chris’s laugh quickly died in his throat as the old man stared at him in silence.

Mark shook his head in the dark. Not the best start, Chris ol’ buddy.

The old man scowled and finally said something. ‘Are you Canadian? ’Cause if you are, you can get the fuck away from my boat.’

‘What? No! I’m English… I just — ’

‘Shine that torch of yours on yourself, so I can see you.’

Chris fumbled with the switch, and then turned it on himself and Mark.

The man studied them for a few seconds. ‘Yeah, you look English,’ he said, pushing the hatch fully open and pulling himself with surprising agility out onto the foredeck.

Chris turned back to Mark. ‘I look English? How the hell is an Englishman meant to look?’ he muttered.

‘You lack American cool,’ Mark smirked.

‘You boys want to hire this boat for a couple of days?’ the old man interrupted, scratching his chin.

They both nodded.

‘Of course we’ll pay top dollar,’ added Chris.

‘You’d have to. This is a workin’ boat. If she’s busy takin’ you boys out on a pleasure cruise, then she ain’t workin’, and that’s gonna cost.’

Chris nodded gravely. ‘I understand.’

The old man looked them over again. ‘This’ll be about the wreck out there, won’t it?’

‘The plane wreck, yeah,’ Chris admitted reluctantly. He had hoped the story would still be relatively unknown, but, it seemed, Port Lawrence was a small town.

‘So… you boys don’t look like tourists. Where you from?’

Chris pulled out a business card and handed it to the old man. ‘I work for a magazine. I want to photograph the plane. I’m doing a story on it. The name’s Chris by the way.’ He gestured at Mark. ‘This guy’s Mark. He’s a diving instructor and he’s here to hold my hand when we go underwater.’