Dead Sea by Peter Tonkin Page B

that people got tipsy or careless – or both – and accidents started to happen. Therefore all the Heritage Mariner news came to the twenty-four-hour desk first.
    â€˜I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Captain,’ Audrey apologized gently.
Not bad news then
, thought Richard. No emergency. Something routine.
    â€˜Yes?’ he repeated, his voice still rough.
    â€˜
Katapult
has just put in a routine status report on the ship-to-shore radio. It went to the coastguards at Falmouth but we’re monitoring the wavelength. It goes into a little more detail than is usual in such contacts so I thought it might be of interest. Shall I play it for you?’
    â€˜Please . . .’
    There was a click, a brief burst of static, and then Robin’s voice, a scratchy, distant whisper. ‘I say again
Katapult
 . . . It is sixteen hundred hours precisely, local time. Our current time is Tuvalu Standard minus one hour. All is well. We are making good progress now. Everyone aboard fit and healthy. We crossed the equator four hours ago and are currently at: nought point four eight degrees north and one seven six point three eight degrees west. Howland Island is immediately to our starboard and we are proceeding at thirty knots along a heading of nought point five nought degrees magnetic. We have come over one thousand miles since departing Tuvalu and expect to reach Johnston Atoll at one six point seven degrees north, one six nine point nought five degrees west in a little over thirty-six hours if the wind persists. We will have to vary our headings depending on precisely where the locator beacon shows the bottle actually to be four days or so from now. And, come to that, what state we find the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to be in when we get to the edge of it – let alone to the middle.’ Robin’s voice came and went during the next few minutes as she reported wind and weather, then formally confirmed their position, course and heading once again. Then it whispered away into crackling silence.
    â€˜That’s all we have, Captain,’ announced Audrey, her voice in contrast to Robin’s loud enough to make Richard jump.
    â€˜That’s fine, thanks, Audrey. It’s enough to put my mind at rest, at any rate.’ Even as he spoke the polite lie he wondered why he still felt so tense. He was still in the grip of whatever chemicals the nightmare had released into his system, of course – but it was more than that. It was something to do with the fact that Robin was out there adventuring and he was stuck here as little more than her audience. He longed to be doing something. Anything.
    â€˜I’m pleased to hear that, Captain,’ said Audrey, over the top of these thoughts. ‘I’ll alert you if anything else comes in from them. Goodnight.’
    Richard settled down, closed his eyes and called to mind a chart of the Pacific, mentally tracing
Katapult
’s course from Tuvalu past Howland Island a thousand miles to the north-east, then on to the Johnston Atoll, one of the remotest places on earth, twelve hundred miles north-east again, a thousand miles west of Hawaii. Then on once again into the massive, empty vastness between Hawaii and Midway, a channel nearly fifteen hundred miles wide which only really ended with the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Strait and the south coast of Alaska. With no islands or atolls anywhere in between at all, except French Frigate Shoals, the last of the way-stations they had planned along the way.
    But even the ones he could call to mind were islands and atolls in name, but nothing more than specks of coral in fact. The only fact he could remember about Howland Island was that it had been the destination the intrepid aerial explorer Amelia Earhart never reached on her solo round-the-world flight when she vanished into that vastness in the nineteen thirties. Johnston Atoll was utterly deserted. Hardly surprisingly: it had been a