Free The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin

up, doll?” The light normality of his tone shocked her back to reality more quickly than anything else could have done.
    “Waterspout, dead ahead,” she said.
    Richard actually cried out aloud with shock, his own left hand reaching down at lightning speed, closing over a cold, hard hand. One of the corpses, moved by the rocking of the boat, had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard’s clothing. The material of his trousers twisted through a frozen, insensible grasp. The very movement of something as cold and clammy as this caused him to step back with revulsion.
    The last body tilted over, raising its hand in a bizarre simulation of a cheerful wave. The next man to him, unseeing eyes fixed on Richard’s, seemed to revive too, as the whole boat, unbalanced by Richard’s abrupt movement, rocked. Richard fell to his knees. And the moment that he did so, something caught his eye. At the bottom of the pile of corpses lay that of a slim figure—almost a boy, hardly a man. Most of his head was missing, but his body was unmarked. It was hunched over, with its back to Richard, but it suddenly stood out fromthe rest because it was wearing a uniform jacket. Not a deck officer’s or an engineer’s, Richard tugged the khaki shoulder, but the corpse refused to move. Richard glanced over his own shoulder, suddenly desperate. The waterspout was getting too close for comfort and there was still no sign of Robin, Hood, or Weary. He tugged again at the dead man’s shoulder.
    The body abruptly turned over as if giving up the fight. In the sodden breast pocket was a blotched white radio message. Richard knelt carefully, angling his body to give maximum protection from the wind, and opened it to look at once. It was written in sinuous Arabic script, as impenetrable as the writing on the crates in the dead ship’s hold had been. But the layout of the flimsy form was familiar enough. There was a space where the name of the ship should be entered. A space for the time. A space for the message. He glared at that first space with almost manic intensity, willing the strange curves of the writing indelibly into his memory. It was nothing more to him than a pattern of lines and dots. But it had to be the name of the doomed ship. The radio officer on every ship he had ever heard of filled in these forms in exactly the same way. This had to be the name of the ship. Then another thought sprang into his mind. If this was the radio officer, then…
    He crumpled the message into his fist and leaned forward; at last he was rewarded. Under the boy’s legs, right at the bottom, providentially wrapped in plastic, was a radio. Richard leaned over, muscles in his legs, back, and belly jerking to keep him upright in the restless boat, and caught hold of it.
    Just as he made this move, the next corpse at the boat’s side followed the other toward the waterspout, pulling the radio operator’s corpse upright as it did so.A cold dead hand clutched at Richard’s face, stiff fingers driving at his eyes as if attempting to protect the precious radio. Richard reacted without conscious thought, driven by primitive instinct. He clutched at the icy forearm and pushed it away, grabbed the slimy shirtfront, and heaved the corpse overboard. It was only then that he realized how he had been betrayed; tricked by the dead men. The radio message had been wadded in the fist he had used to fight off the dead radio operator. As he released the shirtfront, so the flimsy paper slipped through his fingers, too, and the greedy wind snatched it immediately, whirling it away into the stormy sea.
    Richard was up at once. He had had enough. The message was gone but the radio was still here. He grabbed it. Five steps down to the lifeboat’s head. Massive twist of his body to swing the bulky radio onto Katapult, followed immediately by his own chest and legs. Even as he scrambled aboard the rope snapped; the instant his feet kicked free, the lifeboat turned and began to pull