The Fire Ship (14 page)

The head was at the stern, sticking out over the back, a simple wooden seat with a hole in it secured in a secluded spot. Depending on the disposition of its occupant, it could command quite a view. The view from
the stern rail above it was breathtaking this morning. Some time just after dawn, a fishing fleet had arrived. Between
Alouette
and the distant shipping lanes, some twenty dhows had gathered, all of them busily trawling with lines or nets.

“Perfect!” Richard’s fist thumped onto the rail. “Now we just need to check where they’re from.”

“Radio?” inquired Angus.

“No need,” Salah flung over his retreating shoulders. “Glasses should be enough.” He was back in a moment with two pairs. He gave one pair to Richard and pressed the other to his own eyes.

Richard inspected the busy fleet brought closer by the magnification. The boats varied from twenty to forty feet. None had their sails up—all were using their diesels. Hardly surprising—there was no real wind to speak of. On their open decks, figures toiled industriously but he only glanced at them, searching instead for the names of their vessels. He found several very quickly, but they were all in Arabic and defeated him every time. He spoke a fair smattering of Arab dialects, but—much to his chagrin now—had never learned to read it.

So it was Salah who after a moment said, “Jackpot, I think. They all seem to be from Mina Al Ahmadi. There’s even another one with a foreign name.
Seagull.
You see it there? The bright red one? It’s written in English.”

But Richard was no longer looking. That feeling was creeping over him that this was a good day. A lucky day. They had wanted to find
Prometheus
and here she had come with the dawn like a gift. They had needed an excuse to hail her and here was that excuse. They wanted cover and here it was. Today they could do nothing wrong.

“Salah, you steer and stay on the bridge. You’re the
only one not dressed correctly.” Salah wore olive camouflage battle fatigues.

“Robin, you’re the cabinboy or whatever. I’m a general dogs-body. Angus, you’re the fleet coordinator. You’re an important man in Kuwait. You’ve decided to hail this tanker in the middle of your fishing grounds to find out just what the hell it’s doing here. Okay?”

“Fine. On the radio?”

“No. Your radio doesn’t work too well.” Richard gave a lean smile, apparent to the others only in the narrowing of his eyes; his mouth hidden behind the folds of the kaffiyah. “You’ll have to sail right up and talk to them.”

“Right,” said Robin, catching Richard’s growing excitement. “Let’s get the hook up.”

The pair of them oversaw the winching up of the anchor, as befitted their lowly position. Salah and Angus went onto the bridge. Once the hook was up, Richard and Robin went below to oversee the starting of the diesel, and Salah swung
Alouette
’s head slowly to starboard until she was pointed straight at the silent, sinister tanker.

“Wouldn’t we be fishing?” Robin asked Richard tensely as they began to draw closer to her. They were at the very prow, with only the ornamental bowsprit between them.

“No. We’re too important. It’s our job to find the fish and direct the rest.”

They fell silent then as
Prometheus
’s overhanging stern rolled toward them like a thundercloud. Her after-rail and bridge-wings remained empty.

“Would we be using binoculars?” The tension was beginning to tell in Robin’s voice.

“I think we might risk them.” He did so and within moments added, “You know, I’m damned if I can see anyone at all.”

Abruptly Angus joined them. “Richard, she looks empty to me. Deserted.”

“I’d have thought there would be watches on the bridge-wings,” said Robin.

Richard heard her only distantly, his mind back at the discussion they had had in
Katapult
’s cabin the night before last. They had reckoned on intelligent terrorists. But what if they were stupid?

Or brilliantly cunning?

He wiped his mouth through the kaffiyah with the back of his hand. Angus took the glasses and he relinquished them thoughtlessly, mind trying to weigh up the odds. But what were the odds in a situation so completely unknown? It was all guesswork. Blind guesswork, at that. All at once, he did not feel so confident about the luck of the day.

And then they came into the tanker’s shadow.

Salah took them up
Prometheus
’s starboard side. At once the massive length of her became apparent. Fifty
Alouette
s, nose to tail, might just have been as long as she was. What numbers of that sturdy little thirty-footer piled atop each other might have reached her bridge-house, God alone knew. But what struck Richard immediately was not her scale, but her silence. Nothing stirred aboard her. Were they close enough to hear the grumble of her generators? He strained his ears with no success. Not a footstep. Not a voice.

Beneath the bridge-wing they lost way as Angus cut the diesel. They drifted out in silence. More of the bridge came into view—empty.

“Ahoy, the tanker,” bellowed Angus, the Kuwaiti accent thick. First in Arabic and then in broken English—the Arabic easier to understand. Richard was surprised by the power of his friend’s bellow. But then an errant memory jerked him back to the Hay Market ice rink in
Edinburgh and the climax of the Scottish Country Life curling competition with himself brushing feverishly in front of the stone while Angus yelled a mixture of direction and encouragement across the ice as they guided Fettes to victory.

“Ahoy, the tanker! Is there anyone aboard?” Again that stentorian voice in Arabic, then English.

Not a whisper of an answer.

“Let’s go on down,” said Richard quietly to Angus. “There might be a forecastle head watch.”

Angus gestured to Salah and they rumbled forward again. Halfway down, they all looked up wistfully, at the accommodation ladder snugly tucked away some thirty feet above them. There was no way they could get aboard here. Getting aboard at all might prove difficult, even were she completely deserted. The least they would have to climb to gain the deck would be thirty feet, with no hand- or foothold. Nowhere even to secure a thrown rope. Well, thought Richard grimly, they could cross that bridge when they came to it. If they came to it: there had to be a watch on the forecastle head.

Nothing but the cry of a startled gull answered Angus, and in that instant the whole situation changed. Salah kicked in the idling motor and guided
Alouette
around the huge torpedo-head protrusion at the base of the bow. Above them at her head, where the figurehead should have been, was the Heritage Mariner logo, H and M overlapping as the iris of an eye painted there. So
Prometheus
watched them motor round her head to her port side where her anchor plunged down to the shallow sea bed.

The links of the enormous anchor chain fell almost vertically, pulled forward a little and curved slightly by such poor forces as dared disturb her massive inertia.
Each link, an oval five feet from top to bottom, was divided in the middle by a solid crosspiece. The links were still slippery with dew because the morning’s heat had yet to reach them. The moisture made the weed with which they were coated slick and dangerous. The chain would be difficult to climb, but by no means impossible. As
Alouette
’s head snugged into the angle between the chain and the water, Salah cut the engine and left the bridge. Still looking speculatively upward, Richard reached for the nearest link. He had to slip his arm through it to hold
Alouette
still; Salah had judged the approach so perfectly that there was no way left on the little launch and he had no trouble holding her head where it was while Robin secured a line to
Prometheus
’s anchor chain. There was no time for a council of war. If they were going up, they would have to move fast. “I’ll go first,” said Richard and began to climb at once. There was enough tension to keep the chain firm even under his added weight, and so he swarmed up it without too much difficulty, even in his long, unwieldy robe.

At the top of the chain he paused, peering warily in through the hawse hole onto the forecastle head. The sun was shining strongly onto the green deck plates now, so that the air was full of the smell of hot iron and the glare hurt his eyes. Wherever the terrorists were hiding, there were none on the forecastle head. Hanging precariously, Richard gestured to Salah, then he turned back and dived through the oval opening onto the deck of his ship.

Like a parachutist making a textbook landing, he rolled for the nearest cover, hoping that the flash of his white robe would not be visible from the bridge.

He was still certain that someone—someone prepared to answer a hail or not—had to be on bridge
watch. But it was early. It was bright. Any lookout would have to look straight into the low sun to see him. He reckoned he stood a good chance of remaining undetected.

A low whistle made him turn and his heart almost stopped. There was a terrorist crouching behind him. Only at the last instant before he launched himself into the attack did he realize that it was Salah. He had been concentrating so hard he hadn’t even heard the Palestinian come aboard. His shock put things in perspective for him, however, and suggested the next step. Salah was wearing the international terrorist’s uniform. With luck he could creep down the deck and see what was happening. As long as he was careful, it was quite feasible that he could get an accurate idea of everyone’s whereabouts without arousing suspicion. Information that would be invaluable on Sunday when they came back with the Kalashnikhovs and the thunderflash grenades.

Rapidly, whispering despite the fact that they were a quarter of a mile from the bridge, Richard checked that Salah was happy to risk a quick exploration. He was. Then, with a slap on the shoulder he was off, vanishing from Richard’s sight among the forest of pipes running the length of
Prometheus
’s deck.

Still taking care to remain concealed from any prying eyes on the bridge, Richard wormed forward from shadow to shadow until he had a clear view of the deck. Between himself and the bridge there lay an expanse of green-painted metal twice the size of a football field. The deck itself was simply green metal stretching from deck rail to deck rail where it folded down to become the tanker’s massive sides. Partway in from the rails was a series of tank tops standing five feet high, carefully clamped closed. There were small lateral pipes running
from side to side between these, but by far the largest feature on the deck was that central sheaf of pipes stretching lengthways from just in front of him right down to the bridge itself. Five pipes each side measured six feet in diameter. Eight more beside them measured from two feet to four. The whole complex of thirty-six pipes was topped by a walkway running the length of the deck. Immediately beneath this, along the narrow tunnel between the pipes themselves, safe from all eyes, Salah was running silently. It seemed so quiet, so safe, that Richard was tempted to follow—but prudence dictated that he remain where he was.

As the minutes ticked by, however, the wait became well-nigh unbearable. He knew better than to look at his watch—that would only make things seem worse—but he counted his steady breathing unconsciously, as though he were diving. So he knew well enough that nearly ten minutes had elapsed before a tiny flash of movement warned him that Salah had entered the bridge-house.

During the next few minutes, while nothing further happened, he almost convinced himself that the two of them were in fact completely alone aboard.

But then his hopes were dashed and his darkest fears revived as the first flat rattle of automatic gunfire rang out.

The run back down to Fujayrah was a disaster almost from the outset.
Katapult
got under way as soon as Hood returned with the Martyrs and Richard’s orders, pausing only at an all-night fuel-supply dock to load diesel for the engine. Weary, still unhappy to be continuing with the top of the mast damaged and so many of his instruments out of commission, nevertheless acquiesced to the plans and took the con while Sam went down to get some rest. Martyr, still full of vigor, still half a day behind them in the need for sleep, kept that first watch with him and they struck up a working relationship—if not a friendship—during the long night watch.

Christine went below with Hood and took her dunnage pointedly through to the small, forward cabin Richard and Robin had hardly bothered to use. Hood’s dark eyes followed her, clouded with confusion, and, as though aware of them, she first closed the door, and then she locked it.

So the first eight hours passed until the sun rose next morning. Martyr was near exhaustion now, and Doc, too, needed some rest. They simply changed watches: Hood took the con and Christine came up into the cockpit with him while the other two turned in.

The day was incredibly hot and, for all that,
Katapult
was skating across the wind on a strong port tack, seemingly airless. Christine was a sailor—and her father’s daughter to the last inch. After her release from the detox clinic, they had rebuilt their battered relationship during long summer days aboard his sloop
Chrissie
off Martha’s Vineyard. She was at her ease here on
Katapult,
therefore, almost at home. “You don’t need me for this,” she observed to Hood, quite correctly. He would not require any help until they reached the end of this tack up near Queshm, where they would have to come about and head down past the Quoins out of the Gulf.

Because she was so much at her ease, so far from home, and so far from her memories, she did something she hadn’t done in years. She simply slipped off her dress and lay back on the lazarette in the shadow of the sail, rubbing Ámbre Solaire onto her long, golden body. Her high-fashion bikini was a statement of new life for her: not since her father had brought her home had she dared wear anything like this. Heavy jeans and baggy shirts had been her fashion since—anything that would cover up her body and protect it from the eyes of men.

Even when she had come to work in the Heritage Mariner offices, she had followed a subtle variation of the same stratagem. Her hairdresser, enormously expensive but willing to follow orders, cut her hair carefully but unflatteringly so that it seemed as sexless as the clothes she wore, as the front she presented to the world.

Until now. In fact, she was an amazingly strong person. She had been through experiences that should have destroyed her but she had not allowed them to do so. Little by little, inch by inch, with her father’s help but mostly through her own inherent strength, she had adjusted. Recovered. To such an extent that she could now, more than ten years later, dare to wear a bikini.

Hood glanced across at her, a pretty girl oiling herself up to sunbathe. And he froze. He had been looking at her out of the corner of his eye since they had first met. There was something disturbingly familiar about her. And now the memory clicked into place. A memory he had hoped was gone forever.

Back home in Detroit one last time before joining Weary in Sydney, he had attended the wedding of one of the members of his old platoon. It was a typical wedding, he supposed, except for the bachelor party. The best man had taken his duties far too seriously. There had been three strippers, oceans of alcohol, and stag movies galore. Most of the evening had passed in a thickening haze. None of the college-boy highjinks had appealed to him, but he had followed along rather than break things up. After a few hours, in a motel room out on the interstate partway to Grand Rapids, he had gratefully fallen asleep.

Some hours later he had woken again to find himself still in that crowded hotel room facing the TV set. On the screen in front of him, clear as crystal, writhed a maze of naked bodies. A hollow maze. A circle of bodies, at whose center lay a bed. On the bed, alone, a girl lay, stretched out and tied down with ropes. And as Hood had watched, something leaped over the writhing bodies and up onto the bed with the girl. The girl’s face had reared up and he had reared up in answer to destroy the screen and spoil the party after all. But he had acted too late. For he would never forget that face beyond the rapist’s shoulder, nor its expression. Try as he might. For the rapist had not been a man.

Like many seafaring men, he liked reading sea stories and he had started one last year. It had turned out to be less about sailing than he had hoped but he had enjoyed
it well enough. One of the characters in the book had been a pornographic film star and a line of hers had been the last thing to trigger that most unwelcome memory. “If you’re fucking people, you’re still okay,” she had said in this book. “But if you’re fucking animals, then you’re dead.”

And glancing back, up out of the cockpit he saw again, but in real life this time, the face he had seen on the screen that night in the hotel room. The girl from the pornographic video.

He looked away at once, simply too stunned to know how to react. Then he heard her move. How carefully he must have been listening to hear anything at all over the sound of the wind in the sails and the rigging. The thought twisted his face with self-disgust. And that was the expression he was still wearing when he turned suddenly to find her standing immediately behind him. Her expression was impossible to gauge. Hood, normally supremely confident with women, felt out of his depth now. He schooled his face and tried to control his eyes. But the cool lotion had brought her honey skin out in gooseflesh. The points of her breasts showed plainly through the silken bikini top.

“You’ve seen some of my early work, I think?” The dry tone, so formal, so chilly, so Four Hundred, Vassar, Bryn Mawr. And what was she talking about? Pornography. Filth.

“Yes, ma’am, I believe I have.” He kept his tone as dead as hers. As though he were talking to the Queen of England. But the atmosphere crackled around them.

“Magazines? Movies?”

Lord above! Did she really want to know? But there was a ritual air about the inquiries and he suddenly saw the hand of a psychiatrist here. Confrontation. It would
be a good way to go, if you had the strength. Every time you saw that expression on someone’s face, ask the questions. Bring it out into the open. Deal with it.

“I saw it on a video, ma’am. At a bachelor party. I smashed the set and then I left.”

A fractional movement of her head. Almost a nod. She turned and went below. Her back was long beneath broad shoulders and her skin so pale as to allow the down of fine hair that covered her thighs to gleam like gold dust. He watched the way her bottom moved as she swayed slowly down the steps.

And then he felt dirty.

And then he asked himself how he would have felt if he hadn’t seen the video. He would still have watched her, probably, enjoying the sight of her. As though she were a centerfold. But then the fact that she
had
been a centerfold of the most degraded sort came and smacked him in the face. Made him feel even more dirty. And he began to wonder how much of this was his fault—and how much of it was hers.

Doc didn’t need much sleep. He could get through a full, active day on two hours’ shut-eye if he had to, but he preferred four. It was when he slept too deeply or for too long—or woke up suddenly—that his memory went. This morning he still knew who he was when he awoke and strolled into the cockpit just after nine.

“You alone?” he asked as soon as he saw Hood standing morosely by the helm.

“Looks like it.”

“Where’s the sheila?”

Hood was so preoccupied that for a moment he wondered what Weary was talking about—there was no one called Sheila aboard. Then he remembered the
name was Australian slang for any young woman. “Gone below.”

Weary’s wide eyes narrowed. He picked up on the atmosphere at once and he didn’t like it. “Anything I should know about?”

The confrontational method again, thought Hood, unable to get Christine out of his mind, discovering the unwelcome fact that everything seemed to revolve around her now. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell Doc the truth. It wasn’t actually his secret. Nothing to do with him at all, really. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

Weary nodded, his bright eyes still speculative. He knew his friend well enough to trust his judgment. If Hood wanted to let it lie, then that was okay. He forgot about it and went to take the wheel, checking the feel of her through his fingertips as she self-steered toward the top of the tack. She was running gleefully across a steady breeze, every line of her alert. Not stretched yet, it took quite a wind to stretch her, but she was tail-up, and running like a hound to a strong scent. And as sometimes happened, Doc was overcome by an enormous sense of love for his creation. It overwhelmed him, and he enjoyed the feeling too much even to try to control it. He stood like a child awed by the strength of his creation and the emotion she brought up in him. He did not know it, but he was transfigured in that moment. The natural good looks of his open, cheerful face attained a kind of masculine beauty as though lit from within. He seemed to gain stature. The sun glinted off the wind-tumbled profusion of his hair and his dazzling eyes became luminescent.

When he looked down, unaware of how much time had elapsed as he stood in his reverie, he met the eyes of the girl he had just been discussing with Hood. She was
standing in the companionway looking up at him. She had pulled her hair back and tied it in a ponytail. She was wearing an old pair of jeans and a baggy plaid shirt. Her face was devoid of makeup and looked as though it had just been scrubbed. He couldn’t read the expression in her eyes but he was so overcome with a feeling of the goodness of life that he simply beamed at her and said, “G’dday.”

And she smiled back. Against her will and better judgment by the look of things, but a smile nevertheless. “Good morning,” she almost whispered, as though she couldn’t trust her voice.

“I would’ve thought you’d have brought a bikini. To catch a bit of sun.”

“No.” Her voice was stronger. She came up into the cockpit. Beneath the rolled cuffs of her jeans she wore a well-used pair of topsiders, the same as the brand he had on himself. Sensible girl, he thought. “You want some coffee?” he asked. “Sam’s getting some from the smell of things.”

She shook her head and went over to the weather side of the cockpit where she perched on the coaming, looking away forward toward Queshm. The wind made her ponytail frisk about her shoulders and molded the shirt to her body, but Weary didn’t notice. Twenty knots! He was thinking. With this rig. In this breeze. Christ! What’ll she do in a decent blow. With the spinnaker up.

But this thought darkened his mood a little. They still hadn’t had time to repair the top of the mast. If they were going to put a spinnaker up at the moment, he’d have to climb up there with a block and tackle first.

“Coffee, Doc,” said Hood, coming up into the cockpit beside him. And as he did so, that strange, unsettling
atmosphere returned. Weary looked earnestly down at his friend. But Hood had eyes only for the girl.

So that was it! thought Doc: old Sam had fallen in love.

“Hey!” he said, good humor returning to his voice. “You’d better get onto our nice new Navy radio and tell Rass al Kaimah that we’re just about to come back out!”

They rounded the Quoins soon after midday, having come out faster than they went in, but here their progress slowed dramatically. They had been slicing across that unseasonal southerly, but now they had no choice but to run straight into the teeth of it. The afternoon was horrifically hot. The temperature in the desert of Iran immediately to the north of them spiraled past one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and the air there superheated and began to rise as quickly as the temperature, sucking more air up the narrow channel of the Gulf of Oman. So the south wind intensified, blowing into their faces with almost storm-force pressure, unremittingly, as though physically trying to keep them back.

It was a gloomy, dangerous wind bringing no relief from the heat, merely moving northward the parched intensities of the Ar-rab al Khali, that great sand sea to the south of Saudi. Such cooler air as might have been tempted north out of the Indian Ocean was turned aside by the cliffs of Oman and kept well away to the south. But before it crossed the furnace of the Al Khali, that south wind had once been over the Gulf of Aden, and so it brought with it just enough moisture to cause a high scud of cloud. The cloud danced mockingly around the unforgiving, shapeless blaze of the sun and then began to thicken as that indescribable afternoon
wore on, causing Hood, and even the cheerful Weary, to become narrow-eyed and worried.

In the face of that foul wind, they had no choice but to zigzag across the gulf from east to west, clawing their way a little farther south with every tack. But this procedure, hardly one unknown to yachtsmen, was complicated immeasurably by the fact that they were crossing and recrossing the tanker lanes. “Steam gives way to sail” says the old adage of the sea, but in the unlikely event of any tanker captain feeling like obeying it, there were too many pressures forbidding him to do so. The great ships were too unwieldy to turn quickly or easily. The progression of them, a seaborne caravan, was so closely packed here that to attempt any variation of course or speed would be criminally dangerous. Even to try to stop was a process that would take five miles to complete, such was the power of the forces acting on those gigantic bodies. No: Weary never expected to be given an inch. From side to side of the Omani gulf they skipped, therefore, in the teeth of the wind, close hauled as the broiling blast of it intensified, slipping between those great black hulks like
Argo
between the Clashing Rocks.

The atmosphere aboard reflected the atmosphere in the air. Chris said nothing to her father about her conversation with Sam. Indeed, she was still unsure how best to interpret it. Martyr could see clearly the way Sam Hood looked at his daughter, however, and he did not like it. Sam himself felt almost adrift, powerless in the grip of forces he could not comprehend, let alone control. He was repulsed by what he had seen the girl do and yet he could not keep his eyes off her. In the stultifying heat of the afternoon, the three men were wearing as little as possible but Christine remained fully
dressed, armored against Hood’s gaze, which seemed to her to be hotter than the wind.