The Fire Ship (20 page)

“Three!” said Richard to himself as he rolled in. The room was empty. He stood up. Weary came in off the starboard bridge-wing and they both ran left, guns at the ready. But the port bridge-wing was empty, too.

Weary put the radio to his mouth. “Bridge empty,” he whispered, and waited.

Richard stood behind him, eyes slitted against the glare of the sun reflecting off the water, looking down the whole length of
Prometheus
’s deck to that irregular white patch made by
Katapult
’s spinnaker on the forecastle head. Not a stir of motion. Not a flicker. Nothing.

And yet…

“Engine room empty,” whispered Martyr’s voice from Weary’s radio.

Richard slapped him on the shoulder and gestured with his thumb: going down. They moved off like a ghost and a shadow.

They used the same routine going down they had employed coming up. At the A deck level they deviated,
plunging back into the rear sections of the bridge, silently exploring the warren of corridors that led back to the recreation areas overlooking the afterdeck with its swimming pool and helipad. Where the gymnasium was.

The gym was constructed so as to extend the rear of the bridge-house into a balcony looking aft. It had four doors. Two opened down onto the afterdeck by the pool. And the helipad where
Prometheus
’s little Westland Wasp was anchored. Two opened in from the bridge corridor. All of these doors had glass pannels in the top. So that Martyr and Malik coming in from the deck knew a second after Richard and Weary that it was empty. The four of them stood facing each other in the deserted room, looking about silently. The big room showed every evidence of recent occupation. There was bedding on the floor. There were tables and chairs. The ship’s televisions had been moved in here, each with its video player below. But there were no people. Richard looked up, vividly recalling the sound of automatic fire that had echoed behind his last departure from the ship. Sure enough, the panels of the suspended ceiling were splintered, scored, and pocked with bullet holes. But no other damage had been done.

They paused in the gym until Richard had finished that first, rapid inspection, then he led them to somewhere less exposed for a conference. Close to the gym was the doctor’s surgery. Unlike the exercise area, it had no windows. One thick-glassed porthole was the only way of seeing in or out, and the door was solid. Here they grouped, gulping in great lungfuls of air, stilling muscles all quivering with tension, whispering a conversation between ragged gasps. Three of them stood in the middle of the room while Weary stood guard at the door.

“Empty!” said Richard first. “Abandoned! Did you see any sign of life?”

“Not a thing. Not a soul.” Martyr shook his head in wonderment. Then he flicked the
SEND
button on his radio. “No one aboard, Chris. She’s deserted.”

“Where are they all?” Salah looked almost spooked. “There ought to be fifty-two people aboard. But not a whisper. Not a sign.”

“Not quite,” said Weary quietly. “There’s someone here all right. Or has been, recently.” He slid downward, his back against the doorframe, eyes busy through the inch he had left open. He put his left hand on the floor palm down, then lifted it like an American Indian saying “How.”

It was covered in blood. Liquid. Oozing. Fresh.

“No one aboard,” said Chris in wonderment. “All that performance on the afterdeck to an empty theater.” She laughed ruefully and rose, flicking the radio to
OFF.
She stretched and Robin eyed her lithe form enviously.

“I think I’ll go up and join them. You want to come, Robin?”

“D’you think I could get up that chain with my allday morning sickness?” Robin sounded uncharacteristically low since her earlier fright.

“Sure you could,” said Chris bracingly. “The men got themselves up there so it has to be a cinch. Tie her up tight and let’s go. You know if we stay down here we’ll just get bitched at for not having put the spinnaker away.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You know I am.”

It only took them a moment to dress—shirts and jeans over bikinis, and docksiders on bare feet. They made
Katapult
fast to one massive link, then climbed onto the chain itself.

Like the men, half an hour earlier, they arrived on the forecastle head under the light awning of the spinnaker. But, unlike the men, they saw no need to use it for cover. And no need at all to go creeping among pipes when there was a catwalk convenient to their feet. “It is
odd, though,” Chris was saying as they started along the narrow path above the pipes. “Where could they all have gone?”

“I don’t know.” Robin was actually deeply concerned. She had wanted so desperately to find her father here among her kidnapped friends and to release them all together. But finding no one only deepened the mystery and renewed the pain. And put them back in that position of being helpless bystanders. She hated that. Then, half ruefully, she admitted to herself that in this case it was simply impossible to please her, for, while she hated inactivity, she had found the action so far not at all to her taste because it had put either her husband or her unborn child at risk.

As she and Chris strolled along, fifteen feet above the deck, her mind was preoccupied but her eyes were automatically busy. She was a fully qualified ship’s captain after all, and part owner of everything she surveyed. All at once she called to Christine, “Look. The accommodation ladder’s down.”

The ladder was halfway along the ship on the starboard side, just opposite the midway set of steps leading down from the catwalk to the deck. Both Chris and Robin ran easily down these at once and set out across the expanse of green deck toward the ladder’s head. Down here, the heat was intensified, reflecting back up off the deck, which was soon singeing even Robin’s callused feet through the thin soles of her lightweight footwear. They ran across as fast as they could, therefore, and stood looking bemusedly down. The steps were almost at full extension, falling to within five feet of the water. They stirred slightly in the steady south wind and banged dully on
Prometheus
’s side. “This is odd, too,” said Robin. “All of it is bloody odd.”

She turned, absently running her fingers through
her golden curls. And her eyes lit on something else odd.

Just inboard from the top of the ladder was a hatch. It was a low inspection hatch that consisted of a simple trapdoor, hinged and clipped, on a raised rim some eighteen inches high. It led down to a system of tunnels that wove around and between the tanks so they could be inspected from without as well as within.

The hatch cover should have been secured by two quick release clips at all times. The clips on this one were open. Her mind still preoccupied with the mystery of the accommodation ladder, she crossed to this and automatically stooped to snap the catch closed. Then she saw the stains on the deck. Crouching carefully, too wise to think of kneeling, she drifted the tips of her fingers over the brown mark nearest to the hatch itself. They came away sticky. She put them fastidiously to her nose. Even granted that it came from an iron deck, there was no mistaking the iron smell of the sticky stuff on her fingers.

She straightened at once, looking around narroweyed. Chris was still staring down at the ladder, unaware of this new development. Oblivious of the sudden purposefulness of her friend’s movements. With her right foot, Robin snapped the nearest quick-release down. “Chris,” she called quietly. “Let’s go. Now!”

At first, Chris failed to understand the reason they ran down the remainder of the deck but the instant they were in the A deck corridor, Richard came pounding down the stairs, MP-5 at the ready, and Robin supplied the explanation.

“I don’t know who it is,” said Robin as her eyes met Richard’s, “but there’s someone down in the midships inspection area. Someone bleeding pretty badly.”

“Okay,” snapped Richard ten minutes later, “unclip it.”

Weary’s toe moved upward infinitesimally and the clip sprang open. The two men stood tensely, awaiting developments.

Nothing happened.

Weary sidled round to the hinge side of the raised cover and, holding his Kalashnikhov upright on his right hip, he leaned across the metal disk and took its handle from behind. Then he straightened slowly, bringing the cover up to protect his body like a heavy iron shield.

On the far side of the deck, Salah had just done the same thing. Richard put his radio to his lips. “Going in.”

“Going in,” said Martyr in a hiss of static.

Both men carried radios, MP-5 machine pistols, and torches. No thunderflashes. Not down here. The guns were more for effect than anything else. To rupture a tank even with a single bullet would probably be to detonate the ship.

At Richard’s feet, an iron-runged ladder led down into a tunnel dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs heavily protected. Nothing that could ignite stray pockets of gas was allowed down here. Even the leads between the lights were specially sheathed. Richard checked the gun’s safety, then let it hang from his shoulder. He let the radio hang from one wrist and the rubberized torch from the other. They would slide from elbow to wrist depending on what he was doing.

He glanced across the deck one last time, then down he went. As soon as he stepped onto the ladder, Weary was there above him, Kalashnikhov pointing down. Unlike the exploration of the bridge-house, this was a job for one man on each side. One man who knew the tunnels well.

Richard stepped down off the ladder into the first dim gallery and turned, holding his breath. No sound. He allowed the torch to slide down his right wrist and slap into his hand. He flicked it on without moving his feet and shone it on the iron-grating floor. At first nothing. He flashed it farther afield. And there it was, like Ariadne’s thread in the Labyrinth: a bright drop of blood. He put his radio to his lips. “Level one, corridor A,” he breathed. “Going aft. Blood.”

He moved off at once, torch beam on the floor, looking for more blood. Whoever was in here now must have been in the surgery when they boarded. The fugitive had been disturbed by their arrival and fled to this bizarre hiding place. If he realized he had left a trail of blood, then he could use it as a trap. If he wished to attack instead of hiding. If he had the strength after losing all this blood.

“Don’t try to imagine who it might be,” Weary had warned them. “You want it to be one of your people hiding from terrorists. Fine. It might be. Or it might be a terrorist wounded and hiding out himself. Look, Richard, we don’t know what’s gone on here. For all we know, the SAS could have come aboard while we were off Zarakkuh and sorted it out like they did the Iranian Embassy in London.”

“SBS more likely, but I see what you mean.”

“Right. We’ll all have time to think this through properly later. But for now, just see what happens and react accordingly. Fast. Remember: no presuppositions. They’ll get you killed every time.”

Another drop of blood. He went on down the tunnel, every nerve tense. As he proceeded, a memory began to stir. There was something down here. On this level. Something slightly unusual. Hardly worthy of note and yet he had remarked upon it once. What?
When? Good God, yes. There was a little room down here. One of those tiny pieces of fun the occasional marine architect likes to add to a design. A useful little store place among all this maze of tunnels for the equipment one might need down here. Just the sort of place to keep all the sorts of things you were liable to leave on deck or up in the bridge-house by accident. By God, there was a
room
down here.

That’s where he was.

“And don’t be fooled into thinking there’s only one of them either,” Weary insisted in his memory, rehearsing the things his combat sergeant had told him out in Vietnam. “There’s only one wounded by the looks of things, but maybe he’s got a friend.”

“C. J.,” whispered Richard into his radio, “I think I know where they are.”

Five minutes later they converged from either end of that long, midships tunnel to the head of the ladder going down. Silently, and without the aid of their torches, they looked down into that secret little room. They could see and hear nothing. Except, when Richard knelt and slid his finger along the top rung, there was the telltale sticky wetness of the track he had been following. That was it. Here they were.

No way out for their quarry.

No way in for them except down that ladder.

Richard held up his fingers, just visible in the dim, yellow light.
THREE
…
TWO
…
ONE
…

Both torches blazed their powerful beams down into the darkness. The stub barrels of the machine pistols clashed against the ladder.

“All right,” called Richard. “We have you covered. Come out with your hands up!”

“Is that you, Richard?” replied a woman’s voice,
hoarse with fatigue but rich and familiar. “Thank God! I thought you were those bloody terrorists coming back!”

And out into the pool of light stepped Asha Quartermaine, supporting the fainting, blood-drenched figure of Captain John Higgins.

“Help me get him back up to the surgery, would you? If I don’t stitch him up again soon, he’s going to bleed to death.”

The Gulf. Off Kharg Island. 08:15 hrs. Local Time.

As the body of First Officer Cecil Smyke collapsed onto the deck, Captain John Higgins strode forward, totally overcome by rage. The moment he moved, there was a series of sharp clicks as the terrorists across his deck cocked their weapons, and a hoarse, icy voice called out in English, “It won’t be you, Captain. It will be your crew, one by one, like the lieutenant.”

John froze at the threat, looking suspiciously around. Which of the anonymous figures had spoken? It was impossible to tell.

“What do you want here?” John demanded.

“At the moment, nothing more than your cooperation. Order your crew below, please. They seem reluctant to move without your permission.”

“Where below?”

“The ship’s gymnasium, please. All of them.
Now!
” The final word rang out like the crack of a whip. John was about to tell him to drop dead, but a sense of his own ultimate responsibility overcame his hot head. Whoever these people were, they had not boarded without a plan. They knew what they were doing and were ruthlessly willing to enforce their orders. The death of Smyke proved that. “Very well,” he said quietly. “All of
you, please go below at the direction of these gentlemen.”

In the gymnasium, they were at once split into work parties. One began to empty the big room of its sporting equipment. Another brought in bedding. A third carried in tables and chairs. Throughout this bustle, John, Asha Quartermaine, and Bob Stark stood restively under the guns of two men assigned to watch them alone. Both the captain and his American chief engineer were active, dominant men and they reacted to this situation uneasily. They were not alone in this. Asha was pale with outrage and every line of her, from deep red hair to ill-laced shoes, loudly signaled her defiance. Among the crew, Chief Petty Officer Kerem Khalil and Chief Steward Twelve Toes Ho both moved with surly obedience, looking to the senior officers for confirmation before obeying any orders. The atmosphere was tense. Dangerous.

But at last the tasks were completed to the satisfaction of the anonymous terrorist leader. “Sit down,” he snapped. They sat. The terrorists ranged themselves shoulder to shoulder across the room. There were eight of them here, though John suspected there would be more in strategic positions elsewhere about the ship. They all looked similar—in many ways identical. They were all wiry men, thin but strong looking. From the way they moved, they seemed fit. Battle trained. They all wore the same uniform—camouflage fatigues and checked kaffiyah headdresses. The kaffiyahs were folded across their faces so that only their eyes were visible. The skin color on their hands varied slightly, but they all had fierce dark eyes.

Standing all together like that, with seven of them silent, it soon became obvious which one of them was speaking. He could not quite disguise the movements
of his lips and jaw behind his kaffiyah. He could not control the tiny gestures of his hands. And the instant he gave himself away he became their target. Unnumbered eyes within the room searched that speaker’s body for any sign that would single him out for special attention later.

At first sight, there was nothing to distinguish him from the others apart from the fact that he spoke English with an English accent in a hoarse, broken voice, but eventually Asha’s quick, trained eye noticed a thin scar that writhed across the back of his left hand to disappear under his sleeve, and so, even as he threatened them he was marked.

“You will all spend most of your time in here for the next few days. There will be at least two guards here with you at all times. If you fail to obey them they will shoot. If you even so much as threaten them, they will shoot. I have no doubt that forty intrepid men and women could overcome two guards, even if they are armed with automatic weapons, so remember this: beyond the doors will be more guards and beyond them, more still. If you try to escape you will all die like your first officer.

“Now, as to the next few days, the routine is simple. You will remain in here. You may sleep, sit, or walk about. But you may not talk. Anyone who talks will be locked in one of the cabins and will receive no food or water for two days. In this heat, they will suffer greatly, I promise you. You all will, in fact, for to make this punishment effective I will be forced to switch off the ship’s air-conditioning. You will be taken out to the ship’s toilet facilities in small groups twice a day. You will be fed twice a day. Teams of cooks and stewards will prepare food, serve, and clear away under our direction. That is all you need to know.”

“Now look here,” John began.

“Captain Higgins,” said the terrorist leader, crossing to him on swift, silent feet, “I just knew the first one would be you!” and he hit him with his rifle butt on the side of the head.

John came to in the ship’s surgery with Asha by his side. “You did that on purpose,” she whispered.

“Well, I’m no use cooped up in there.”

“Not so loud! There’s a guard outside the door.”

“Where do you think they’ll put me?”

“Don’t count on them putting you anywhere. As we were carrying you out of the gym I heard him say that you got one chance—they got none.”

“Damn! Well, we’ll just have to see what happens next, I suppose. Ouch! That stings.”

“Iodine. When you’ve got a plan worked out, let me know.”

“You’ll be part of any plan.”

“Yes, but I won’t be in there with you. They’re moving me out. Keeping me apart.”

“That’s nasty.”

“Logical. I’m the only woman.”

“Yes, but…”

“Don’t worry about me.”

The door slammed open and the two of them whirled guiltily. One of the terrorists stood frozen in the doorway. Something in the room seemed to have come as a great shock. The gun dangled in limp hands. The kaffiyah mask moved from side to side as the terrorist’s head shook. Both John and Asha tensed, sensing a chance. But they were too slow. The gun snapped up again to point unwaveringly at the captain. Then the barrel gestured: move.

Back in the silent gym, John considered that last
terrorist. A slighter figure than the rest. A different way of walking. A woman? He filed the thought away for future consideration.

During the days that followed, beneath the stultifying boredom of the routine a kind of war was fought. It was the type of war a class of schoolboys might declare on a hated teacher—but it was no less serious or deadly for being so. In the enforced silence, observed to break down communication, communication flourished. Notes were passed until all paper and writing implements were confiscated. Sign language developed. Codes. And every message successfully passed bolstered the crew’s morale and undermined the guards’ authority. These games centered around John and Bob Stark. There was no situation that these two could not turn to some subversive advantage, to the delight of their men and the discomfiture of their captors. They became past masters in the art of dumb insolence. They time-wasted in a thousand ways. They became stupid, clumsy, disruptive.

As time passed, the campaign had its effect beyond questions of morale. The guards became tired, snappish, dangerous. As the endless days dragged by, a tense situation was escalated toward the explosive. And all the pressure settled upon the head of one man. The man responsible for the whole situation. The leader of the terrorists.

They singled him out for special attention. They never missed an opportunity to challenge his authority or undermine his power. They gestured silently behind his back. They reacted more slowly to his orders. They were more stupid, clumsy, childish when he was around. They exercised their ingenuity to the utmost trying to destroy him in ways that would not cause him to destroy them first. And, indeed, as four days passed, then
five, the strain on him did seem to be intensifying beyond bearing. Almost as if he were waiting for something. Something that should have happened some time ago, but had not.

That was another objective of their endless communication games—speculation. Who were these people? What did they want? How could they be defeated? The regimen they imposed made anything other than guesswork extremely difficult, but in those early days speculation was rife. John and Bob collected it, sifted it, and filed it. Both of them knew with increasing certainty that the only way to get hard facts was to run the risk again that John had taken at once—to get thrown out. Only outside the gym was there a real chance to gather solid information. Only out there, in the little Westland helicopter, was there any real chance for escape. But the Westland had no fuel aboard, and only Bob knew how to fly it.

Kerem Khalil and Twelve Toes Ho became part of the central committee too, for they could begin to supply some information about what was going on outside. Their men were doing the cooking, cleaning, and other odd jobs required by the terrorists. Anyone who went out of the gym for whatever reason was thoroughly grilled on his return. Were there guards outside? How many? Had they seen one set relieve another or were they all on duty all the time? Where were the terrorists sleeping? Eating? Keeping watches? Even visits to the latrine became like sorties into enemy territory.

Life for Asha Quartermaine was very different. She was given much more freedom to move around the bridgehouse from her quarters, to her surgery, to the library. Whereas the others filled their days with their games to ward off that terrifying boredom, she caught up with her reading and plotted alone.

She saw no one from the crew at all after that first tending of John’s bruised skull. When the stewards were preparing or serving food she was kept well away. Her own meals were always brought by the slightest of the terrorists—the one she suspected of being a woman—and eaten alone. She had her own small shower and toilet in her quarters so she never needed to use the crew’s. When the crew went to the toilet or the showers she was again kept clear so that not even the most intricate planning on her part could bring about an apparently accidental meeting with John or Bob. She began to feel more than lonely—she began to feel distanced. Deserted. No matter what John had said about including her in any plans they made, she began to feel that they had abandoned her.

And so she worked on her own plans.

Her whole reason for being here, the outcome of nearly a year’s work and planning, was to contact her twin sister. She was the elder by a matter of minutes, but that fact colored her relationship with Fatima. Asha was the maternal, paternal, strongly protective half. The reliable one. The caring one. The doctor. Fatima had been wild, mischievous, adventurous. The romantic. The political activist. The reporter. The thought of her Fatima, trapped in a foreign society, that brave soul of freedom caged by the whim of a born-again Muslim father, was more than Asha could stand. She blamed herself for allowing Fatima to go to his bedside. She tortured herself with the thought of what it must be like for the flamboyant feminist to be held in the most repressive of conditions. Alone and friendless after her divorce from Giles Quartermaine, she had become almost morbidly worried about Fatima. And then the first letter had arrived. Posted during her flight through Dahran immediately after her escape from their father’s
house, it told of Fatima’s life there and how she was now free.

That first letter had begun the transformation of Asha’s life. For a start, it had emphasized how much had already changed since Fatima had been taken away—her young sister had no idea she was now divorced from Giles Quartermaine. Indeed, part of that turbulent missive proposed that Asha should get Giles to run a series of programs for Western television about the terrible injustice of forcing liberated women into conditions she described as medieval servitude.

Giles Quartermaine, in fact, featured largely in Fatima’s early proposals, for that first letter was followed by others. The tenor of the letters changed as time went by, and Asha came to suspect the truth: that Fatima’s offers of journalistic contacts within various terrorist cadres actually included Fatima herself. Asha’s divorce from Giles Quartermaine had been reported quite widely, but nowhere Fatima could read about it, and the reason for her ignorance became disturbingly clear: freedom fighters such as she had become no longer read Western gossip columns. So her little sister continued to refer to her ex-husband, relying on him to guarantee her worldwide publicity as soon as she required it.

The letters did not arrive regularly or often. There were by no means many of them tucked in Asha’s writing case in her cabin, but there were quite enough to give the elder sister a firm idea of her twin’s rough whereabouts. With nothing to lose, therefore, Asha had handed in her notice at the small hospital she had been working in since the divorce and started to plan how she could get to the Middle East—preferably the Gulf—to look for Fatima. Becoming a ship’s doctor aboard tankers filling at Kharg Island gave her just what she needed—a feeling of being close to Fatima and a steady
job into the bargain. She would probably have drifted onto Heritage Mariner’s ships eventually in any case—after BP they were the largest British tanker fleet—but for some reason she could never quite fathom, they featured once or twice by name in Fatima’s letters. She came onto their fleet on purpose, therefore, and found the friendly atmosphere aboard was very much to her taste. And so, amid the companionship so sorely lacking in her life since the double blow of the kidnap and the divorce, she began to let time slip by.

Then the last letter arrived: the one that had brought her here. It was another one for Giles, really, though addressed to her at their old home and forwarded, like the others, by her bank. In it, Fatima offered her dazzling brother-in-law the veiled promise of a scoop. All he had to do, she hinted, was to keep an eye on the Gulf in general and on Heritage Mariner’s flagship in particular. At first, Asha thought of handing the letter to the authorities or even to Richard Mariner himself—but in the end either action seemed too much like a betrayal of Fatima. So she simply folded it up, put it with the rest, and contacted the ship’s doctor on
Prometheus.
Would he mind swapping berths for a trip or two? Of course not. And so it had been done. Her motivation was as uncomplicated as it had been since she had lost Fatima: to get her little sister back again. Or to see her—perhaps talk to her—at the very least. She had been almost relieved to come out of the hold behind John Higgins and find the deck crowded with terrorists.