Man Overboard Read online

  MAN OVERBOARD

  NATHAN BURROWS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Author's Note

  Also by Nathan Burrows

  1

  The most important thing, in terms of injuries, when entering water from a height, is the angle of the body to the surface. Get it right, and a person can slice into the water like a professional diver. Get it wrong, and the surface of the water can be as hard as concrete. In Dylan Lewis’s case, he got it wrong. Very wrong.

  There were plenty of other compounding factors in Dylan’s injuries. It was the height that he had fallen as well. The foredeck of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Apollo, which was where he had tumbled from, was almost sixty feet above the grey water of the South Atlantic Ocean. It took barely two seconds to reach the water from the deck, but that was long enough for him to accelerate to just over forty miles an hour. His velocity, when combined with the angle he hit the water, was devastating.

  Dylan didn’t realise that he had fractured both of his femurs when he had hit the water. The shock of the impact, combined with the freezing cold water of the sea, was enough of a distraction for him not to notice his injuries. He may have even lost consciousness for a second or two, because the first thing he remembered after the fall was bursting back up through the surface of the water, propelled by the compressed air in his life jacket.

  “Help me!” Dylan shouted as loud as he could. “Someone help me!” He raised an arm to wave at the large grey hulk of the ship that was about fifty feet away from him. It was silhouetted against the moonlight, and Dylan was caught in the wake of the dual Lindholmen Pielstick Diesel engines’ propellors. The white froth that they churned up was battering him from side to side, his now useless legs unable to help him swim out of the bubbling water. No-one could hear him over the noise of the engines. Unless someone had seen him fall, Dylan knew he could only survive for a few moments in the ice-cold water.

  Dylan shouted again, waving both arms desperately, but the enormous ship just carried on moving through the grey sea at its top speed of eighteen knots. He blinked once or twice as the full realisation of his plight dawned on him. The RFA Apollo, now over a hundred feet away from him, wasn’t coming back to get him.

  A moment later, Dylan was finally spat out of the wake of the ship and was in clearer water. He tilted his head back and looked at the stars, waving his arms gently through the water in a futile effort to stay warm. He’d never known cold like it in his life, nor would he ever again. His body tried to compensate for the cold. Unknown to Dylan, his blood pressure and heart rate had both increased as his peripheral circulation shut down. His breathing had sped up, and the large muscles in his body shivered as his body did its best to preserve Dylan’s core body heat. Perhaps, fortunately for him, his awareness was fading at the same time.

  Dylan closed his eyes and did his best to summon up an image of his wife, Myfanwy. In his mind’s eye, she was standing by the hearth in their small cottage, warming her calves against the flames. Dylan smiled at the memory. It would be cold outside, and the rain would be lashing the rolling hills and valleys, but they would both be warm by the hearth.

  “Myfanwy, Myfanwy,” he mumbled under his breath. “Before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer, will you say…” It was a line from a poem by a Welsh poet called Dylan Thomas, and it was also the same phrase he had used to propose to her. The moment had only been a couple of years previously, but to Dylan, it seemed like a lifetime ago. Which, in a sense, it was.

  “Yes, Mog. Yes, Mog,” Myfanwy had replied in her sing-song Welsh accent. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  The last image in Dylan’s mind, before the grey that was encroaching on his peripheral vision became absolute, was Myfanwy smiling at him warmly as she ran her hands over her distended belly. The belly that contained the son or daughter that he would never see. The son or daughter that would never see him.

  Dylan opened his eyes for one last time and gazed up at the dark sky. Then he took his final breath with only the moonlight for company.

  2

  At the first sound of the piercing alarm, Sergeant Lizzie Jarman froze in place, but only for a split second. The familiar whooping noise of the Giant Voice public address system told everyone within earshot that there were incoming rockets, and the alarm filled her with dread. Since she had woken up that morning, Lizzie’d known that it was going to be today. It was only a matter of time before one of them landed on or near her. And it was going to be today. She just knew it.

  Lizzie threw herself to the ground, just as she had done a hundred times before. She looked around, seeking cover. The only thing near her was a large metal container of some description. Lizzie shuffled her way over to it, realising that she didn’t have her helmet or combat body armour with her. She must have left them back in the accommodation. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and the whoosh-whoosh noise it made in her ears was almost drowning out the warbling alarm. Unable to get under the container, she pressed herself against it as hard as she could.

&nbsp
; The worst part of the entire experience was the not knowing. The alarm went off when a missile launch was detected, but that was only for a single rocket. There could be a whole series of them, all set up to detonate their launchers over a period of time. Until the Giant Voice was sure there were no more incoming, there would be no all-clear. The longest Lizzie had known between the alarm sounding and the continuous tone of the all clear was ninety minutes. Ninety minutes during which time seven people had died, all killed instantly by unguided Chinese 107mm rockets full of explosive charges.

  Lizzie closed her eyes tightly and wrapped her arms around her head instinctively. She knew that if a rocket hit anywhere within around fifty metres of her location, her posture would make no difference at all. The white-hot metal shards would slice through her soft flesh and into her head. She could only hope that when the end came, it was quick. Better to be blown to pieces and killed instantly than sliced to ribbons and die slowly.

  The worst case she’d dealt with in recent memory was a Canadian soldier who had just stepped outside his tent for a smoke. There had been no alarm that morning, just a muffled crump as the rocket hit the ground. It had been several hundred metres away from Lizzie, but much closer to the Canadian sergeant. The shrapnel had torn through him relentlessly from behind, and the force of the blast had thrown him almost twenty metres across the rough ground of the Afghanistan desert.

  Lizzie had arrived perhaps fifteen minutes later, mere seconds after the all-clear had sounded, her backpack full of her paramedic medical supplies. As she had approached, keeping a close eye out for any unexploded ordnance, she had been convinced the man was dead. He had to be. There was a red trail where he’d been scraped across the ground by the force of the explosion, both his arms and legs ripped from his body. To Lizzie’s amazement, when she knelt by his ruined body, a groan had emanated from his lips. The poor man was still alive, and she couldn’t even hold his hand while he died. In the end, she cradled his head in her hands and sung him a long-forgotten lullaby while he breathed his last breaths. Her medical equipment was useless.

  “Please, please, please, please,” Lizzie muttered under her breath. It was her usual mantra. “Let it be quick when it happens. Please let it be quick.”

  As she lay there waiting for the rockets, including the one that was undoubtedly destined for her, Lizzie’s thoughts turned to her boyfriend, Adams. They’d not been together for long, but the feelings she had for him were far deeper than she thought he realised. He was also a medic in the Royal Air Force, and they had been through so much together that for her to die alone without seeing him one last time was unthinkable. She forced herself to think of him, determined his face would be the last thing on her mind when she died. But try as she might, other thoughts invaded and pushed him to the back of her mind.

  Would it hurt? The brain could survive for four minutes without oxygen from a pumping heart, so would she still be conscious until the oxygen ran out? Lizzie had read about near-death experiences. Some of them were heart-warming, inspiring almost. But some of them were horrendous. People spoke of every nerve in their bodies being on fire in the most unimaginable pain possible. And she had been stupid enough to forget her body armour and helmet. What little chance she had of surviving a hit from a rocket had gone. Adams would be furious with her.

  Lizzie clenched her pelvic floor muscles. She was desperate for a pee. And she didn’t want whoever scraped up her remains from the floor to get her urine on themselves if she wet herself in the process of dying.

  “Make it quick, make it quick,” Lizzie muttered again under her breath. In the background, the Giant Voice had faded away, having done its job of warning everyone they might be about to die. Lizzie listened carefully for the sound of explosions. The worst ones were the ones that got louder as the rockets walked across the base. There was a saying that you never heard the one that kills you, but Lizzie wasn’t sure that was the case. She could smell cordite. It was harsh and acidic in her nostrils, but she didn’t think she had heard an explosion.

  When Lizzie felt a hand on her shoulder a few seconds later, she jumped so hard she thought her heart was going to burst out of her chest. For a split second, she had been convinced it was a direct hit.

  “Miss?” a male voice said. Someone shook her shoulder gently. “Miss? Are you okay?”

  Lizzie opened her eyes and blinked in the harsh light. But it wasn’t the harsh light of the Afghanistan desert. It was whiter and was flickering. She unwound her arms from around her head and raised her head a few inches to see who was talking to her. It was a man, younger than her, who had squatted down next to her. He wasn’t wearing combats, had no helmet or body armour, and didn’t even have a rifle. He was wearing a suit with a bright orange tie.

  “Who are you?” Lizzie whispered, her mouth as dry as sandpaper.

  “My name’s Tim, and I’m the assistant manager. The supermarket fire alarm just went off, but it was a false alarm.”

  Lizzie looked around, realising that the metal container she’d tried so hard to hide under was a large industrial freezer.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “You’re in Sainsbury’s,” Tim replied with a look of concern. “Are you okay?”

  3

  Chief Officer David Slade whistled through his teeth as he read the engineer’s report on the ship that he was about to take command of. He’d waited almost forty years for this moment—to finally be the man in charge on the bridge—but it appeared the Royal Fleet Auxiliary had given him a rust bucket to oversee.

  Slade, a bulldog of a man from Edinburgh, had started life as a trainee chef before deciding that a life on the ocean waves would be a better bet. When he was only twenty-two, he had embarked on his first ship, a small tanker called RFA Gold Rover. On his first day, he’d received a bollocking from the captain for asking him where the toilets were.

  “We use heads on ships,” the captain had rebuked him. Both the captain and RFA Gold Rover were now long gone, but Slade had never forgotten the moment.

  In the intervening years, Slade had worked his way up the ranks. He started out as a baby assistant purser before being promoted to purser and then chief purser. He had served in the first gulf war on RFA Sir Geraint, a Round Table class ship, but had come home unscathed. A couple of shore-based roles followed at the RFA headquarters in London and then Portsmouth before Slade was back to sea again, this time to Angola as part of a United Nations mission to try to stabilise the place following years of civil war.

  Now, with a shiny new rank slide on his black waterproof jacket, Slade was the latest Chief Officer Logistics of the RFA Apollo, a hospital ship that was, like Slade himself, in the twilight of its career. Originally a container ship, the British government had requisitioned it in 1982 to support the Falklands war effort and ended up buying it outright after the war when they realised that having a floating hospital probably wasn’t a bad idea.

  “What do you think, Palmer?” Slade asked his chief engineer, a man he’d worked with several times over the previous few years. “You think she’ll hold up okay?” They were standing on the bridge of the Apollo, currently in a dry dock in Falmouth. Through the large windows in front of them, Slade and Palmer could see the short foredeck of the ship, the full one hundred and seventy-five metres of the ship behind them.

  Palmer, a fellow Scot from Glasgow, also whistled through his teeth.

  “She’s in a right sorry state, to be honest,” he replied, tracing a yellowed finger down the engineering report. “Look, read this bit.”

  Slade adjusted his glasses on his nose and leaned forward to look at the text Palmer was pointing at.

  Metal flecks noted under number four and five pistons. Gudgeon pin in number five piston close to failure and damage to piston skirt noted.

  “Okay, but what does that actually mean, Palmer?” Slade asked.

  “On its own, not a lot. I can replace the gudgeon pin and fix the skirt. But it indicates the previous engineer wasn’
t on top of it. If the pin had failed at sea, the ship would have been stranded,” Palmer replied.

  “That’s probably why he was sacked.”

  “True. That, and the drinking,” Palmer said. “But it’s what we don’t know about that worries me. If he couldn’t even keep on top of basic maintenance like this, what else didn’t he do?”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic, Palmer,” Slade said with a smile as he crossed to a small table and flicked the switch on the kettle. “We’ve got a couple of weeks before we set sail. Plenty of time for you to work your magic on the old girl.” Slade put a hand on the main control panel of the Apollo almost reverently. “She’ll be okay.”