Beyond the Poseidon Adventure Read Free Page A

railing of the ship and contemplated with concern the unbroken surface of the sea. He was a solid man, physically as well as temperamentally. He was not tall, but his chest and arms had a heavy, serviceable look about them. The head, well set upon a strong neck, was grizzled, and on the back of it was perched a white yachtman’s cap. The gold badge embracing intertwined nautical insignia proclaimed him captain.
    A small sticking plaster covered the cut on his chin where he had been flung across the cabin.
    He lifted his head and seemed to be sniffing to several quarters like a dog orienting himself. “I do not like it, Coby,” he offered, eventually. “I do not like it.”
    “Why not, papa?”
    He looked down at his daughter and saw his own far-seeing dark blue eyes. Her blue-black hair, braided and coiled over her ears, enabled her to ape the angle of her father’s cap. But instead of the badge of office, she had pinned on a cheap gilt replica of one of her native country’s windmills.
    “It smells of earthquake weather,” he replied.
    “Smells? It actually smells?”
    He smiled a little. “No, not really a smell. It is a feeling, a sense. That tidal wave that nearly capsized us, it must have been due to some disturbance of the earth. It is the only possible explanation.”
    “But it’s calm now,” she said.
    “Too calm. It is not often when the earth shakes like that. I know little about earthquakes, but I shall be happier when we reach Athens. In the meantime, goodness knows how many smaller boats must have been capsized. I will keep watch. You go to bed, Coby. It’s long past midnight.”
    “In a moment,” she said. They were quiet for a while, listening to the uneven chugging of the old engines. From time to time he turned and examined the unbroken black of sea and sky.
    But it was Coby who saw it first. “Look, papa,” she cried and pointed. There was a sudden flame, a rocket trail, and a blinding burst of white light. For two minutes, half a square mile of sea was brilliantly illuminated, and they saw quite clearly a small black boat in the middle of the shimmering light.
    Urgently Klaas called up to the bridge. “Bear off six points to starboard, Piet. There’s a boat. Make for it.”
    The light died, and in the dark the Magt came upon the dinghy a shade too quickly.
    “What the hell are you trying to do, save me or swamp me?” The accent was unmistakably American and the tone amazingly nonchalant for a man stranded at sea.
    Klaas called to the bridge again. “Reverse a few turns and then shut down.” He switched on his lantern and for the first time they saw their shipwrecked mariner. He looked about as frightened as if he had been walking a dog around the park. He was wearing the denim shirt and worn jeans that is the uniform of every harbor bum hanging around the moneyed ports of the Mediterranean. But there was something about him that suggested the unkempt blond hair was a lack of vanity, nothing more. His face was crinkled into a mass of well-practiced laughter lines in the lantern’s glare, and they saw skin stretched over high cheekbones and a long, tough jawline.
    “My apologies . . .” Klaas shifted the lantern to case the glare on his face and waited for him to complete the sentence.
    “That’s better,” he said. “Captain Jason.”
    Klaas was slightly piqued at the rower’s dig at his seamanship. He called down, “If you’re looking for the golden fleece, Captain Jason, I am afraid you are going in the wrong direction. It’s the other way, to the west, isn’t that right, Coby?”
    Eagerly she joined in. “Yes, Colchis is on the east coast of Turkey.”
    The lone figure was bending over tying the oars to the thwarts. “Wrong,” he said. “That’s where it was until Jason and the Argonauts took it. It ended up in Thessaly.”
    Then he turned round and rose, balancing on spaced feet. “But I’m the Jason who lost The Golden Fleece. My sloop.” He waved a hand