Dead Tomorrow

plotted.
    Marshall clicked on the ship-to-shore radio and leaned forward to the mike. ‘This is Arco Dee , Mike Mike Whiskey Echo,’ he said. When the coastguard responded, he radioed in his position. Working out on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where visibility could fall to just a few yards in the frequent mists and fogs that came down over the English Channel, it was important for all positions to be noted and updated regularly.
    Like his otherseven crewmates, most of whom had worked together for the past decade, the sea was in Malcolm Beckett’s blood. A bit of a rebel as a child, he had left home as soon as he could to join the Royal Navy as a trainee engineer, and had spent his first years at sea travelling the world. But, like the others on this ship who had begun their careers on ocean-going vessels, when his first child, Caitlin, was born, he wanted to find work that kept him at sea but enabled him to have some kind of family life.
    Dredging had been the perfect solution. They were never at sea for longer than three weeks and returned to harbour twice a day. On the periods when the ship was based here in Shoreham, or in Newhaven, he was even able to nip home on occasions for an hour or so.
    The captain reduced speed. Malcolm checked the engine revs and temperature gauges, then glanced at his watch. They would be back in phone range of the shore in about five hours. Five o’clock this evening. The phone call from Lynn had left him deeply disturbed. While he had always found Caitlin a difficult child, he was immensely fond of her and saw a lot of himself in her. On the days that he took her out, he was always amused by her complaints about her mother. They seemed to be exactly the same issues that he had had with Lynn too. In particular, her obsessive worrying–although, to be fair, Caitlin had given them both plenty to worry about over the years.
    But this time ithad sounded even worse than anything before and he felt frustrated that the call had been cut short. And very worried.
    He pulled on his hard hat and high-visibility jacket, left the bridge and clambered down the steep metal steps to the gridded companionway, then down on to the main deck. He could feel the sharpness of the winter breeze rippling his clothes as he walked across to get into position to supervise the lowering of the dredge pipe into the sea.
    A couple of his former navy colleagues, whom he met up with from time to time for a drink, joked that dredgers were nothing more than floating vacuum cleaners. In a sense they were right. The Arco Dee was a 2,000-ton Hoover. Which meant 3,500 tons when the dust bag was full.
    Mounted along the starboard side of the ship was the dredge pipe itself, a 100-foot-long steel tube. For Malcolm, one of the highlights of each voyage was watching the dredge pipe sink out of sight into the murky depths. It was the moment when the ship truly seemed to come alive. The sudden clanking din of the pumping and chute machinery starting up, the sea all around them churning, and in a few moments water, sand and gravel would be thundering into the hold, turning the whole centre of the vessel, which was the cargo hold, into a ferocious cauldron of muddy water.
    Occasionally, something unexpected, like a cannonball or part of a Second World War aircraft or, on one nerve-racking occasion, an unexploded bomb, got sucked up and jammed in the drag head–the mouth of the pipe. Over the years, so many historical artefacts had been dredged up from the ocean floor that official procedures had been established for dealing with them. But no guideline existed for what the Arco Dee was about to haul up on this occasion.
    When the hold was full, all the water would drain off through openings in the spillways, leaving what was, effectively, a sand and pebble beach in the middle of the ship. Malcolm liked to walk along it as they headed back to harbour, crunching through some of the hundreds of shells that got scooped up, or occasionally coming across a hapless fish or crab. Some years ago he had found what was later identified as a human leg bone, a tibia. Even after all these years, the mysteries of the sea, especially what lay beneath it, filled him with a childish excitement.
    In about twenty minutesor so it would be time to raise the dredge pipe. Malcolm, taking a quick break in the empty mess room, sat on a battered sofa, cradling a mug of tea and eating a tabnab–as scones were called in navy slang. The