A thousand suns

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.

Chapter 1

The Assignment

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.

After clearing immigration at JFK, he’d headed for a barber, yearning to feel the smoothness of his chin once more and lose the dead weight of his long, greasy hair tied up carelessly in a ponytail.

As the interminably itchy and aggravating facial hair was whisked away by the barber, Chris had been shocked by how thin his face had become. The last few months of existing on a basic hi-sugar diet and spending all day long in the freezing winds of the South Atlantic seemed to have robbed his face of any spare fat. He knew if his mother could have seen him then, she’d have scolded him for not eating properly.

Chris’s focus extended beyond his reflection in the glass towards a trim, silver-haired woman moving swiftly. He watched her weave her slight frame across the open-plan floor of the Features Section through a labyrinth of shoulder-high partitions towards the conference room. She was moving quickly and purposefully towards him, not a woman you’d ever want to risk keeping waiting, he fancied. Clearly she was running late with her own strictly imposed schedule. Chris had time enough to hurriedly straighten a couple of the pictures before Elaine Swisson, the deputy editor of News Fortnite, pushed open the door to the conference room and entered.

‘Hey, Chris, how’s my favourite little cockney urchin doing?’ she said with a no-nonsense Brooklyn accent.

Chris had once described Elaine to a friend by asking him to visualise Susan Sarandon’s older, more aggressive sister. He wasn’t sure whether the actress even had an older sister, but if she did, Elaine should be her.