The Fire Ship (10 page)

All he had to do was to slide his crowbar into the trench and he should be able to get the anchor free. There were some heavy-looking rocks farther down that would hold
Katapult
against the night’s calm and sluggish tides. He put down the spear gun, concerned that it might get tangled up in his efforts, took the steel crowbar from his belt, and moved forward. Already planning what to do with the rocks and the anchor—should he prove strong enough to carry it on his own—and wondering whether he should check those nearby boxes as well, he thrust the crowbar down toward the hook of the trapped anchor, only to hurl back, shouting with surprise as the eel attacked.

What sort of eel it was, he never knew. He was no expert and could have made no distinction between types. He remained ignorant also of its precise size, but he related it easily enough to the scale of his own body. Its head, jaws fastened onto the crowbar, was almost the size of his own head. The body that uncoiled with breathtaking rapidity out of the shadows seemed as broad as his thigh, perhaps as his waist. And it was longer than he was.

The power of the thing was awesome. Only his shockstrengthened grip kept him attached to the steel crowbar as the two of them tumbled backward end over end. His only clear thought was an overpowering command to his brain to keep breathing regularly. His lungs obeyed but the demands of galvanic action taxed their calm rhythm severely. Time ceased to have any meaning for him. His left hand, torch dangling from its wrist-strap, grabbed the far end of the bar, forcing the eel’s head away from his own, and they rolled back into
the darkness, face to face as though the eel were a rabid dog at his throat. He felt its length whip round him and begin to squeeze. Wildly he wondered whether these things could crush you like anacondas. Then his shoulders crashed into angular solidity and he had the strangest feeling that he was tumbling down stairs and the image was so overpowering, so disorienting, that it took him a second to realize what had actually happened. The eel had pushed him against the pile of discarded explosives boxes under
Katapult
’s keel.

He thrust forward with all the power at his command, feeling the unsteady pile crumbling around him. The momentum of the eel’s attack was gone in any case and so he found himself moving back toward the crack where the monster lived—and not a moment too soon. As they rolled across the ridge, so the pile of boxes collapsed, some of them disintegrating to spill their contents out onto the seabed. Invisibly in the darkness, a small black disk, some four inches in diameter and two deep, flew lazily toward the crack in the ridge. It was well wrapped in clear plastic, which should have kept it waterproof, but as it landed, so the plastic ruptured, and instantly a thin trail of bubbles coiled upward. On the next bounce, a second later, the disk attained the black cleft and tumbled in. Two seconds later it exploded.

One instant, Richard was aware only of his blind test of strength. The next there was a flash of light and a detonation that made his ears ring. And the eel was gone. Dazzled and deafened, he fell to his knees on the thin ridge, pulled the torch into both fists, and swept its puny beam around in a tight arc.

Nothing.

The eel, more sensitive than he, had been more affected by the explosion and had swum away. No sign of it remained.

He stayed exactly where he was, on his knees, breathing slowly and regularly, waiting for his heart to slow. Waiting for the jumping in his limbs to still. Waiting for the next explosion.

Nothing.

The line around his waist, tangled around much of his body now, jerked suddenly and set his recovery back somewhat. He jerked in return to let them know he was all right, then waited. It took some time, but at last his heartbeat steadied, his breathing became normal and his limbs still. He untangled himself carefully and returned to the trench.

His torch beam showed him the mess the eel and he had made of the boxes. That crazy pile was now strewn willy-nilly across the seabed, but it looked as though only two were open. A cursory inspection revealed many boxes to be the same as the two that had burst, some distinguished by having a large X marked upon their sides. Both burst boxes contained flat black disks wrapped in clear, strong plastic. The look of the things was familiar.

Sidetracked into rummaging through his capacious memory, Richard was paying scant attention to the scene in front of him where the stem of the anchor protruded from the cleft in the narrow ridge, but suddenly a movement there pulled his distracted gaze into sharp focus and he realized wryly what the eel had done: it had run home. And its home was beside the anchor. If he tried to free it again, it would attack again. This looked like a stalemate.

Abruptly a shrill whining filled his head and an instinct trained into him years ago at diving school whipped his left hand toward his face plate. The luminous display on his diving watch was flashing at him. Four minutes and counting down. He should simply give up and return to the surface now.

But he would be damned before he would let himself be beaten by a fish.

Then, because he was thinking of something else entirely, he remembered what the black disks were. They were thunderflash grenades.

He didn’t think beyond that. He didn’t bother to weigh the implications. He knew what they were. He knew that they worked. He knew how to get rid of the eel—perhaps even without hurting it. Now, where had he put the spear gun?

It was easy enough to attach the grenades to the spears. They were wrapped in plastic just loose enough to push the spear points through. The first two he tried proved disappointingly ineffective. Neither detonated, though he was certain he had armed them correctly. The third was much more satisfactory. Almost as soon as he thrust the spearpoint through the plastic and twisted the top of the disk, a thin line of bubbles burst into the torchlight. He took careful aim and fired again. The spear sped straight and true. Richard curled his arm over his eyes. A second or two later there was a detonation from deep within the trench. Richard never knew whether the eel survived, but it was certainly absent when he moved to free the anchor.

Partway through the process, the line around his waist jerked urgently again.

And that, in the end, was what made up his mind.

The Gulf.

“Thank you, Rass al Kaimah. Multihull
Katapult
leaving Hormuz inshore traffic zone now…” Hood consulted the piece of paper Weary had just passed to him. “Position fifty-six-fifteen east, twenty-six-twenty north. Time logged at…”

“One-thirteen, local,” announced Robin, her clear eyes on the chronometer.

“…thirteen thirteen hours local time. Inbound on a heading of…”

“Due west,” called Richard, who held the con, his gaze flicking back up from the compass to their course as he spoke.

“…due west for Bahrain Island. ETA at Manama Harbor…”

“Eighteen hundred tomorrow,” said Weary without even glancing up from the chart table where he was plotting their course with practiced ease.

“…eighteen hundred hours tomorrow. Are there any special warnings or standing orders in force, over?” Hood drew an ebony hand down over his smooth, perspiring face. His short, black curls were jeweled with moisture.

“Good afternoon,
Katapult,
this is Rass al Kaimah,”
said the radio clearly. “We have you at fifty-six degrees and fifteen minutes east, twenty-six degrees and twenty minutes north on an inbound heading due west for Manama harbor, Bahrain Island, with an ETA at eighteen hundred hours local time tomorrow. There are no special warnings in force at this time. We expect the weather to remain as it is, though the wind may strengthen from the south during the day due to the unusually low pressure over the center of Iran. There may be light northerly winds during the hours of darkness. On your heading, you will pass south of Fate but north of Jesirat bu Musa. Beware of oncoming tanker traffic beyond Fate. You will enter the Iranian advisory zone at Jesirat bu Musa. I assume you have already contacted Bandar Abbas, over?”

“
Katapult,
affirmative, over.”

“Good. Then you should proceed,
Katapult.
Oh, and post a lookout. There may be mines in the waters south of Fate.”

“Say again, Rass al Kaimah?”

“
Mines
in the waters south of Fate.”

“Robin,” said Weary over the top of the radio message. “You’re on watch. Up and out.”

“I read you, Rass al Kaimah. Watches have been posted. Will advise you of any change.
Katapult
over and out.”

Hood flipped the radio to general receive and turned it down to a background babble. “Mines,” he said, his voice disgusted. “Jesus! Is there anything in these waters that doesn’t burn or blow up?”

Keeping watch was not Robin’s idea of good fun. Kneeling on the foredeck gingerly, careful not to burn herself, she tried to get comfortable without obscuring
Richard’s view. His face was behind the small windscreen at her left hip. Once in place, she tried to concentrate on scanning the sea all around the multihull. But it was hard, because of the heat. The Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman had been nothing compared to this. The brisk south wind brought no relief from the power of the sun. It was not moving as English breezes seemed to do, with a cool will of its own, but because it was being sucked sullenly from one hot place to another. And it was so humid that the sails dripped with moisture. Robin’s hair, already perspiration-soaked, curled wildly, and her heavy clothing stuck to her. It was, literally, like a sauna—and in the overpowering heat of it, she was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved pullover, a scarf, and a hat. The fact was that any flesh left bare to the sun would blister in seconds and burn in minutes. Sunstroke was a very real danger. They had started taking salt-tablets at dawn—which had caused her morning sickness to extend itself until midday.

In the agonizingly clear distance, sharpened to uncommon focus by the activity of the south wind, a tanker loomed, superreal. Robin could see every detail of it, every line and plane and surface.

She shifted position slightly, trying to get some shade from the sail, while resisting the temptation to start thinking about cold drinks. It was less than half an hour since she had had one and she was parched already. Instead, she thought back, past that horrific hour over the explosives dumping zone to that one word she had said when they were discussing what they most needed in order to take back
Prometheus
and get word of her father:

“Help!”

It had not been a cry in the wilderness, of course. It had been the beginning of a series of practical maneuvers.
For they could summon help if they needed it. Help was as close as a call to Angus El Kebir. Robin allowed herself a brief indulgence. Of all Richard’s friends, Angus was her favorite—apart from C. J. Martyr and Salah Malik, both of whom shared the unassailable distinction in her eyes of having saved Richard’s life. In her mind, she called Angus “The Red Beard,” for all the world as though he were a heroic figure from a novel by P. C. Wren or an operetta by Sigmund Romberg.

As though it were yesterday, she remembered their first meeting nearly ten years ago when she had gone to his Dubai office trying to get aboard Richard’s ship, the first
Prometheus.
How well she remembered the steely glare of his pale, Scottish eyes, the twining of his fingers in his red Rob Roy beard. And the cold disdain with which he raised that eagle beak of a nose and thinned those perfectly sculpted desert prince’s lips. On first meeting they had fought like cat and dog. They had been the best of friends ever since.

Angus’s mother had been a Scottish nanny flown out to Dubai to tend the royal offspring, but one of the Sheikh’s cousins had married her instead. It had been a strange match but a successful one. Angus had attended Fettes College in Edinburgh and there he had first met Richard and there the two had started their own friendship. Now Angus kept offices in Dubai, on Za’abil Street, near Sheikh Ahmad’s palace overlooking the Creek; and in Manama City, Bahrain, on Old Palace Road near the Soukh. He had set them up first as an agent for Crewfinders, the first company Richard had ever founded, but now he maintained them as Heritage Mariner’s agent as well.

Just as Angus had been the first to contact them with the news, so he was the first they had contacted when starting to form their plan.

“Richard! At last! Yes, I hear you five by five. I was growing concerned, old friend. I thought you had been taken, too. Only your radio! Well that is good news at least.” How well Robin remembered that first transmission as they neared the Gulf at last.

“No, there is no more news from here. I have messages for you from all over the world, but no real news at all. Helen Dufour and Sir Justin Bulwer-Lyons have raised nothing other than sympathy from the Foreign Office in London. Eric Ellen’s people at the International Maritime Bureau may have more, I expect to be hearing from them again soon. Chris and C. J. Martyr in New York pass on messages from Bob Stark’s father: nothing doing in Washington either. They’re all too nervous of the situation in Iran. Apparently, the Navy and the Air Force are at each other’s throats there. It’s a powder keg.”

“All right, Angus,” Richard’s clipped tones echoed in Robin’s memory, bringing an unconscious stirring of lust to her heavily-wrapped body, which was beginning to behave a little oddly now, gripped by the hormones of early pregnancy. Nine weeks down, thirty-three to full term. “Here’s what I want you to do. First, I want you up in Bahrain—we’ll coordinate from there. It’s nearer
Prometheus
and more open. It has the international airport at Muharraq.

“Then get Martyr. He can leave Chris to run the New York office and…”

“Martyr’s already moving, Richard.” Angus’s calm pronouncement still made the short hairs on Robin’s neck stir. Ten years before, the events on the first
Prometheus
had made a friendship between these people more like that of a combat unit than of business associates. They still held a reunion dinner every year. They called it “Separation Day” to commemorate the night
their ship had broken in two. Richard, Robin, Sir William, C. J. Martyr, John Higgins, Twelve Toes Ho, Kerem Khalil; all who had been aboard that night and lived to tell the tale. At first, also, Salah Malik, the great silent Palestinian ex-PLO man who had been chief petty officer on that fateful night had attended, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. But of later years, Salah had effectively vanished, returning to the continuing tragedy of his beloved Beirut, impossible to contact any longer.

Of all of them, Salah was the one they most needed now. Perhaps he even knew the men holding her father and her ship. The realization seemed to hit her like a blow in the stomach. Her thoughts grew murderous…

She jerked her mind back from that dangerous path and returned them to yesterday, to that moment when Angus had told them Martyr was moving.

Of course he was. They all would be. Richard didn’t even need to contact them. They would know. From all over the world they would come like the crew of a fishing village’s lifeboat when the alarm sounds, leaving their families, their work, their lives. All they had to know was where Richard and Robin were heading for and somehow they would be there. Except for the man they needed most.

Except for Salah.

Her thoughts now full circle, she shook her head and brought her mind right back to the present. Richard still stood at the helm, though with
Katapult
slicing steadily across the wind on automatic setting he was there only to take evasive action should Robin spot anything. The other two were below, going about some business of their own.

And now they were just coming under the shadow of
Fate. The massive oil platform, Fa’at to the Arabs but Fate to Westerners, rose out of the choppy sea on four great rusted legs like some ancient iron monster. Like some latter-day Colossus of Rhodes, she thought, striving to straddle Hormuz as the original had straddled Rhodes Harbor. It was an anachronism, out of place; deserted, unused, mysterious. It looked as though it had been built for the North Sea with a high platform raised further by cliffs of deserted prefabs clustered around its central derricks. The other platforms that studded this sea were flimsy by comparison, relying on small waves and tideless waters. But Fate was different. Alien. Almost eerie.

Who had put it there, when or why, Robin had no idea. Why they had abandoned it and left it deserted to rot like the
Marie Celeste
or the
Flying Dutchman
at anchor, she had never been able to discover. Yet there it stood, four strong legs rising out of that shallow sea, each one a hundred feet in circumference. Fifty feet high to the first level, a hundred to the flat tops of its buildings. Perhaps an acre in area, packed with emptiness, ruin, and despair. She had never been up there and knew of no one who had, but the atmosphere of the thing reached this far with ease. It was avoided alike by the small craft running south of it, hugging the coast superstitiously, by Abu Dhabi and Dubai; and by the tankers running north pushing the deep-water lanes dangerously close to the Iranian naval stations on Jezireh ye Qushm, ten scant miles beyond.

A sharp double click jerked her mind back aboard. While she had been daydreaming about Fate, Weary and Hood’s mysterious industry had moved from the cabin to the afterdeck. They had opened the lazarette and brought out both the box she had rescued from the
burning ship and the other one, marked with a big X, they had also pulled up on the end of Richard’s line from the explosives dumping ground last night. And, surrounded by plastic-wrapped thunderflash grenades, they were stripping and checking the Kalashnikhovs.