Outpost

Ship gossip. Most of the crew were east Europeans working for tips. Romanian and Polish. The Romanians hated the Polish. Officers had to mediate.

Jane thumbed through the pages, scanned trivia, searched for the moment it all went bad.

She sat back in the chair and put booted feet on the desk.

The ship docked at Trondheim two weeks into an Arctic cruise. They brought aboard fresh supplies and a couple of new waiters.

Three days out: an incident in a kitchen. One of the new waiters went berserk. He cut himself with a cleaver, then attacked two pot-washers. Deep cuts. Bite injuries. The waiter was restrained and sedated. He was confined to the medical bay.

Thank God no passengers were hurt.

A couple of nights later a group of passengers gathered to sip hot chocolate on deck and watch the Northern Lights. They saw a distant figure at the end of the promenade climb over a railing and jump into the ocean. The figure was wearing a white galley uniform. The figure appeared to be hugging a heavy fire extinguisher to help himself sink.

Passengers threw lifebelts into the sea and raised the alarm. The ship came to an immediate halt. The crew trained searchlights on the sea. No sign of the man.

Quick headcount. The missing man was a pot-washer treated for bite wounds.

The captain radioed ashore for medical advice. Four staff and two passengers had been admitted to the infirmary for treatment. They were delirious, restrained, and bleeding from their eyes and ears.

Representatives of Baltic Shipping instructed the captain to implement full quarantine procedures. Isolate all infected personnel and head for the nearby port of Murmansk.

The ship was turned back from Murmansk. Their maydays were ignored. They tried to approach the port, despite the harbour master’s refusal to let them dock, but were fired upon by Russian soldiers as they threw mooring ropes to the jetty. Instead, they sailed west towards Norway.

Patrick Connor. Bosun for nine years. The captain’s closest friend. The men stayed aloof and professional during the working day, but most evenings they sat in the captain’s cabin and uncorked a bottle of claret. Neither man was supposed to drink. The seniority of their positions meant they were never truly off duty while the ship was at sea. So they sipped wine in secret and enjoyed their little transgression.

It has been a week since Patrick was bitten. I have had to watch the horrifying progress of this disease. I have had to watch my friend slowly become a monster. It has been the worst experience of my life.

Patrick was bitten on the face. He was bending over Lenuta Grasu, one of the Romanian cabin maids, when she broke her restraint and bit a chunk from his cheek. He immediately washed and disinfected the wound, but both he and the captain knew it would do no good. The disease was transmitted by body fluid like HIV or hepatitis. Once a person became infected they quickly succumbed to dementia. They, in turn, would bite and claw, be driven to transmit the infection any way they could. Rafal, the Trondheim waiter who was the first to show signs of infection, was lashed to a hospital bed. He spat and snarled. He was horribly deformed. There was little chance he would recover.

Dr Walczak, the ship’s surgeon, referred to the disease as rabies, for want of a proper diagnosis. By the time they reached Norwegian waters the fourteen-bed medical bay was full to capacity. The staff commandeered a couple of staff cabins for use as treatment rooms. Patrick Connor had volunteered to help Walczak, allowing the doctor to get much needed rest from time to time.

Patrick wrote farewell letters to his wife and children, then allowed himself to be restrained. It took less than twenty-four hours for the disease to take hold. In rare lucid moments he begged for death.

The captain made frequent visits to the medical bay.

This evening Dr Walczak and I had a long conversation in which we discussed the best form of treatment for Pat, the best way to relieve his suffering.

Next diary entry:

We held Patrick’s funeral service at noon today, and committed his body to the deep.

The captain liberated a few bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from the galley. No journal entries for the next three days.

Jane lay on the bed. She scanned the notes. Page after page of carnage. One by one the captain’s crew succumbed.

The engines were shut down. Hyperion drifted north of Norway.

They lost the lower levels. They hoped that, by dropping the watertight compartment doors, they would seal infected passengers in the lower cabins. But the passengers found the stairwells before the crew had time to finish building barricades.

First Officer Quinn issued his men with Molotov cocktails. If they held their ground in the stairways, if they drove the infected passengers back down to the lower levels, they might retain control of the upper decks.