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the ship and drowning the men one by one.
    After a time, Menhaus nervously said, “Hey, Fabrini? You hear the one about the gay rabbi who wanted a sex change?”

8
    In the pilothouse, Iverson had forgotten about his
Hustler.
Forgotten about tits and ass and everything in-between. He’d been feeling groggy when Gosling came in, knowing he was pulling the dogwatch and thinking how far away morning was, sucking down a lot of coffee.
    But now he was wide awake and it had nothing to do with caffeine.
    Radio was out. Satnav and Satcom off-line. Compass fucked-up. Iverson was a modern sailor. He trusted his instruments, had complete faith in them. And when they were out, it was back to celestial observation and dead reckoning, paper charts and sextants. Back to the jungle. Just like in the old days when a ship at sea might as well have been on another planet. Alone, completely alone.
    Iverson sipped his coffee and swallowed.
    What he was watching was the radar. The screen had been empty for the past hour, but now it had locked onto something. Something big, something spreading out for miles and miles it seemed. Something like a bank of fog that was like no bank of fog Iverson had ever seen. Even the radar’s computer was having trouble telling exactly what it was. It was not solid, certainly, it was a gaseous envelope like a patch of mist … yet much denser. And the
Mara Corday
was steaming right into it.
    Twice now, Iverson had made to call up the old man, but had hesitated. What could he say? A bank of fog?
Jesus H. Christ, Iverson, you called me up here to look at a bank of fog?
No, he couldn’t call the captain in on this. Besides, Gosling had the deck and you didn’t want to be going over his head. Gosling wasn’t the sort you wanted to piss off. Gosling saw the fog coming. He’d seen it first and it was he who told Iverson that, the way it was expanding and the rate it was moving at — an unprecedented sixty-knots, if radar was reading it right — there was no way they could get around it. Whatever it was, it had them. Had them tight, by Jesus.
    “Besides, for chrissake,” Gosling had said. “What the hell am I going to tell the skipper? We steamed twenty miles off course to avoid some fucking mist?”
    Sure, that made sense.
    But it didn’t make Iverson feel any better. Because it was almost on them now and he could see it filling the screen, opening up to swallow them like the jaws of some immense beast.
    Iverson began to pray under his breath.

9
    George Ryan and Cushing were forward, up near the bow watching the ship cut into the flat, glassy waters.
    “This isn’t bad at all,” George said. “I could handle sailing in seas like this.”
    Cushing smiled. “Don’t get your hopes up. It won’t last. A freak calm, that’s all.”
    George suddenly narrowed his eyes and peered into the night. “Check it out,” he said.
    “You see that?”
    It was like somebody had strung up a rolling white tarp in the distance. It was getting larger by the second, blotting out everything, eating the darkness and the sea foot by foot.
    “Fogbank,” Cushing said, unsure.
    George had never seen anything like it. It was a huge, undulating blanket of yellow-white mist, sparkling and luminous. It took his breath away. Within a minute or so, you could see nothing else. It was like the heavens, clouds and all, had fallen to earth and consumed everything in their path.
    “Quite a sight, eh?”
    George and Cushing turned. Gosling was standing there, arms folded, his pipe dangling from his lips. He looked strange, tense maybe.
    “You ever seen a fogbank like that?” George said.
    “Sure, plenty of times. You get ‘em out here,” he said.
    For some uncanny reason, George had the odd feeling that he was being lied to.
    “Are you going to steer around it?” Cushing asked.
    “What do you think?”
    And they knew what he meant. It was everywhere, closing in from what seemed every direction. There was no avoiding it unless