The Fire Ship (23 page)

Fate.

As soon as he was certain that the distant voices were not just another trick of his imagination, Bill Heritage started beating on his door and yelling at the top of his lungs. During the time he had been in this dark, silent room, he had come to know it so intimately that he could see it in his mind’s eye almost as clearly as if the light were on. He moved about it unerringly now, for learning it had been what had kept him sane so far. Or nearly sane. So far.

When he awoke each morning—he called it morning when he woke up, though he had no idea what time it really was—he stripped altogether and did a long, complicated series of exercises. By the time he had completed these, he was always running with sweat, so, cosseting himself exactly as he would any of his thoroughbred racehorses, he walked gently round the room until he was dry. Only then did he dress. It was important to his self-esteem that he keep his clothes as clean and odorless as possible. Dressed in his shirt and trousers, he would then go for a tour of his room. He would explore it thoroughly, every bit as minutely as he had on the day of his arrival. He would test his memory by predicting what lay within a hand’s breadth of his fin-
gers. He would take risks, gamble with himself, by walking rapidly in any direction then stopping, to find himself within an inch of the slop bucket, the bed, a wall. Every irregularity on these walls he knew by touch, but especially well he knew the doorway that never let in light or coolness or draft of fresh air. Whose round metal handle turned easily enough, but uselessly. To no avail.

In this way Sir William Heritage lived out some of the strangest days of his long life with nothing to do but to feel his way about the tiny room, await the daily rituals of feeding and slopping out, and rack his brains to think where he might be. It occurred to him he might be in a water tank, or something of the sort underground, for the warm walls felt more like metal than plaster to him, and the stale air smelled of iron. He imagined he might be aboard ship somewhere, moored in Beirut Harbor—but there was no movement of water beneath the keel; no grumble of generators for power.

Never during those long days and nights, in all his reasonings and thoughts and deductions, did he ever dream that he was aboard a disused oil platform at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

“Hey!” He hammered on the door, yelling as loudly as he could. “In here! In here!”

And his cries were answered at once by the sound of the bolts going back. He stood back, eyes narrow, expecting blinding light. But the door opened to reveal a tall figure dimly silhouetted. “Ah, Sir William,” it said, incongruously, in punctilious English. “So there you are! Come along. I think we’ll put you in with the others now.” Something in the man’s tone warned Bill that this was not the SAS, come to set him free.

It must be a ship of some kind, he thought as soon as he walked out into the corridor. The combination of
white-painted, rust-streaked metal and bumpy, frayed linoleum had a decidedly maritime feel about it. The impression intensified as they climbed almost naval companionways. And yet the whole structure was rock solid. And he could hear traffic in the distance…

Light dawned, actually as well as metaphorically, when they came to deck level. They rounded a corner, and a window let in a shaft of light so fierce it had discrete edges as though it were a column of golden crystal. And outside, the unmistakable lines of an oil platform with the tanker-filled Gulf, sullen in the heat, equally unmistakable beyond. The rumble of traffic resolved itself into the sound of surf upon hollow iron legs.

“My God!,” he said, his voice rusty from disuse. “It’s Fate.”

“Oh, Sir William,” said the tauntingly familiar voice of his guide. “It’s so much more than that!”

But then all conversation between them stopped. The guide opened a door and Sir William found himself on the threshold of a large lecture hall, where, under the guns of a dozen armed terrorists, stood the crew of his tanker
Prometheus.
At once his eyes were searching for the faces of John Higgins, Asha Quartermaine, Bob Stark. Only Bob was there, pale but defiant, leaning on Kerem Khalil. There was blood on Bob’s leg.

“You will have time to greet our other distinguished guest in a moment,” said the Englishman to them all. “In the meantime, listen to me. You know the rules. Keep to them. The guards may allow you to talk at their own discretion, but this is a privilege easily revoked. You will find life here a little harder than it was on
Prometheus.
There is no bedding or air-conditioning or videos or books. But I am sure you can adapt. Your discomfort is likely to be temporary. There will soon be
enough for all. In the meantime, remember this. The watchword is
obedience.
Your lives depend upon it.”

“Who is that chap?” was Bill’s first question, a moment later.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Sir William. Mind if I sit down? This leg hurts like a son of a bitch!” Kerem helped Bob down onto the floor. “Only a scratch, and bandaged at that, but just at the stage of stiffening up. You know how gunshot wounds can be.” Tersely, he explained how he had come by it, putting Sir William’s mind at rest about the two missing faces. Then he asked, “How long have you been here?”

“As near as I can estimate, since the day after you were taken. I’d come to Bahrain to try to get you out. They took me at Manama. Drugged me. Brought me here. I thought I was in Beirut.”

“Thanks for coming to help us. Appreciate that.” The two friends looked at each other long and hard. Then Bob continued, “But if you were out here alone working to free us, that means State doesn’t want to know.”

“That’s the way it was when I came out. Even the President seems hesitant on this one. The Gulf is a powder keg at the moment. They say Iran is near to civil war: navy versus air force.”

“My father must be going mad with worry!”

“That he is. Or was when I flew out.”

A pause.

“Any idea what these people are actually up to, Bob?”

“Not really, Sir William. They were waiting for something, a signal or something, on
Prometheus.
I don’t think it ever came. Then they brought us down here anyway. Just ran out of patience, I guess.”

“Must be more than a signal, Bob. From the way that
chap was talking just now, they’re expecting supplies, not messages. And that means…”

“A ship. God Almighty! Put terrorists together with a ship and what do you have?”

“Arms smuggling.”

“Right! So what we have here is a small group of hardline terrorists on an abandoned platform at the mouth of the Gulf with enough hostages to make sure that no one’s just going to sashay right up and blow them away. We know they don’t need small arms because, as we can see, they are well supplied with those already. So they have to be waiting for something heavier. Rockets, maybe. Wireguided missiles. What does this picture look like to you?”

“My God, Bob, they’re going to blockade the strait. They’re going to sit here threatening to destroy any tanker that tries to get past. And they could do it, too! They’re going to close the Gulf!”

They moved the admiral’s big radio up onto
Prometheus
’s bridge and left the smaller communications center on
Katapult.
Richard had decided not to contact anyone—not even Angus, yet. But clearly, if they were going to fit into the pattern of Gulf shipping without arousing unwelcome interest until they reached Fate, they would have to be able to talk to other ships and coastal stations at the very least.

Two things obviously counted against their hopedfor anonymity, thought Richard. Firstly, who they were. The moment they told anyone that they were the Heritage Mariner tanker
Prometheus II
heading from Bushehr to Hormuz, alarm bells would start ringing from here to the White House. God alone knew who would come sniffing around then. Secondly,
Prometheus
would stick out like a sore thumb to the men on Fate even before they saw her name, because she would be the only unladen tanker going out of the Gulf. But that situation was not insurmountable either, for the tanker carried pipes that could be lowered over the side. She had pumps that could suck sea water aboard once she was under way, and distribute it evenly among the tanks until she appeared to be fully laden.

Just as Ben Strong had done on the original
Prometheus
ten years ago, to conceal a missing cargo of oil.

Ben!
Richard drove his fist against the helm. He gazed out along the darkening length of
Prometheus
’s great green deck, but he saw nothing of the pipes, tank tops, hatches, Sampson posts, winch housings, pumps, steps, and walkways before him. Saw nothing of the early sunset beyond. Instead he saw the face of Ben Strong, his godson. He saw it as he had last seen it, mad and murderous, behind the handgun he was an instant away from firing. An instant before his ship broke in two and hurled the madman to his death, insanely singing out, “Good-byeeeeeeee.”

And now here was the nightmare resurrected, his madness almost subsumed in Muslim fundamentalism, still at war with the world, and with Heritage Mariner. Able to lay his hands on all the weapons in a modern terrorist’s arsenal. The thought was absolutely chilling. Never in his wildest dreams would he have guessed that the mysterious Englishman and the unfortunate twin in blind Sinbad’s story should have been so closely related to themselves. It was as though Fate truly had a hand in this: the force, not the platform. Though who could tell the difference any more?

The lift doors behind him opened and John gasped in pain as he turned in the chair to see who was coming. “We can get her started,” called Robin. She and Martyr had been looking at the engine.

“We can get under way whenever you want.” The American’s deep bass replaced Robin’s warm contralto, and Richard turned to meet their expectant gazes at last.

Chris and Doc were on
Katapult.
Asha was in the surgery. Salah was checking the stores. The others were here, waiting for orders.

“Right,” said Richard. “We sail at sunset. It will take us twenty-two hours to get down the Gulf. If we move out of the lanes and slow down a little toward evening tomorrow, we can get everything set up and arrive
with the last of the light. We’ll have three watches on the bridge but none in the engine room. Set that on auto and leave it. It should be all right for a day. Starting at eighteen hundred, John will be on watch up here with Salah and Asha. C. J., you will relieve them at ohone hundred tomorrow with Chris and Doc.”

“Fine,” agreed Martyr. “What about
Katapult
if they’re up here?”

“I’ve thought about that. We’ll have to tow her. It’s the only way. We need constant watches. If they sail her, they’ll have to keep twenty-four-hour watch themselves while we’ll be doing six hours on and six off. We’d all be exhausted by the time we hit Fate.”

“Yeah. I can see that. Okay, I’ll go tell them to batten down…”

“No. I’ll go in a minute. You and Robin had better go and get the engines ready. John, I’ll find Asha and send her up here. Then I’ll get the others out of
Katapult.
Secure her to the stern and see if the three of us can get the hook up.”

“Tall order for half an hour’s work,” observed John.

“It’s going to be bloody hard work for all during the next twenty-four hours, on watch and off. Can you work at the chart table, without too much discomfort?”

“Yes,” lied John cheerfully, heaving himself up out of the chair.

“Good. I need our best route to Fate worked out ready for when we set sail.”

“Consider it done,” said John. “In fact it has been done. I’ll check his workings if you like, but I’ll bet you that what Ben Strong has marked there will be just the ticket.”

“Perhaps,” said Richard dryly. “But he must have been laying for a smaller ship. The one that took them off last night.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’ll probably be the same. He was a good seaman.” Richard paused. “Then we’ll just have to hope,” he added as he went, “that whoever is steering
Prometheus
can follow the madman’s course.”

Richard found Asha in her surgery and sent her to the bridge. She was pleased enough to go, knowing that John would need her there if he was going to do much moving around. Salah was in the ship’s refrigerator, checking provisions as ordered. Richard sent him up to the bridge as well. He knew John would need an experienced helmsman the instant they got under way. He had designed the watches carefully so that there would be an experienced officer and helmsman available to each as well as a third person for lookout and emergency backup. Robin and he would take the last watch themselves, starting at 09:00 hours in the morning, while the others caught up on sleep or made final preparations. And after the end of their watch, at sunset tomorrow,
Prometheus
would either have a full complement once more, or she would be in no condition to need any watchkeepers at all.

These reflections were quite enough to take him out onto the baking foredeck where he came face to face with Chris and Doc, who had just finished securing
Katapult
at the foot of the accommodation ladder. Succinctly, Richard explained to them what he had told the others and the Australian nodded his agreement. Ten minutes later,
Katapult
was resecured on a long line to
Prometheus
’s afterdeck and the three of them were on the way to the forecastle head, racing like children on BMX bikes.

It was by no means a difficult or a lengthy task to winch
Prometheus
’s great anchor up off the shallow,
sandy seabed, and, in the absence of tide, it made no real difference to her disposition whether the hook was up or down. Not even the south wind would move the inert mass of the tanker. Only her great screws could do that. And sure enough, as they sped back up toward the bridge, the deck began to throb beneath them and the steady blast of the southerly seemed to swing around the quarters so that as they returned the BMXs to the rack under the awning aft of the A deck door, a steady headwind blew in their faces along the deck.
Prometheus
was under way.

Five hours later, Richard sat back, massaging his tired eyes. Completed on the worktop before him were all his notes and contingency plans rendered into manageable form. He patted them with grim satisfaction. They would go into the log so that if anything went wrong in eighteen hours’ time…At the thought he glanced at his watch: 23:05 local time. Damn! He had run over the hour. He flicked a switch on the big transceiver beside him and caught the tail end of the World Service news.

“…the worst plague of recent years still moving north destroying millions of acres in the Ethiopian Rift Valley and on the Danakil plain in Eritrea. Experts hope that the strong southerly winds will blow them across the Red Sea and into the desert of Ar-rab al Khali where they will perish. This seems to be a faint hope and in the meantime, the people of Saudi Arabia are bracing themselves for the onslaught. And finally, cricket. The English batting collapsed at the Oval this afternoon in the face of an unremitting onslaught from the West Indian pace attack. England’s top scorer, with a total of seventeen runs, was…”

Richard made a peculiarly Scottish sound of disgust
and turned it off. Time for bed, he calculated. A busy day over and a busier about to begin. He sat back in the spare chair on the bridge, the image of John’s captain’s chair except that it was on the starboard side. Salah Malik stood at the helm. John sat, half asleep, in the captain’s chair. Asha, her face green and ghostly, divided her scrutiny between her patient and the collision alarm radar that watched the waters around them, alert for danger there.

“I’ll just set this to an open emergency channel. Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said. But he showed no sign of moving. For the first time since coming aboard he had a little leisure to luxuriate in the simple fact of being back aboard.
Katapult
had been like a holiday, vivid and exciting. But this was like coming home. All his senses were attuned to the familiar sensations around him, from the steady throbbing of the engines coming through the floor to the sight of a star-bright, calm Gulf night distanced by the clearview. The smell of the conditioned air. The taste of it on the back of his tongue. The sheer size of his bridge. Of his vessel.

Home.

Humming a little tune to himself, he went off to look for Robin. When he found her, he would take her to the officers’ pantry and they would make a cup of cocoa, drink it, and go to bed. It was what they did at midnight every night when they were at sea together. The prospect of it made his contentment complete, almost as though he were insensible to the danger they would be in tomorrow.

In eighteen hours’ time every single one of them could be dead.

They were up again before six, well aware that it would take the better part of twelve hours to get sufficient
water aboard to make
Prometheus
seem like just another laden tanker outbound through Hormuz.

As the swift dawn broke into yet another stifling day, so they worked, with Richard firmly in command and—typically—the most active. To pipe heads standing three feet high, they attached great hoses that reached left and right across the deck before the bridgehouse. The deck railings were opened, and the ends of the hoses rolled overboard to fall thundering against
Prometheus
’s high sides, down into the sluggish sea. The ends of the hoses plunged deep beneath the surface, dragged back toward the stern at once by the tanker’s steady progress through the water.

Richard ran to the cargo control room at once. Its long window looked forward to where the pipes were attached. Here Robin was just completing the programming of the computers according to the plans they had agreed on last night. Now the Mariners stood shoulder to shoulder as she punched in the final instructions. The computers immediately communicated with the pumps in the pump room three sheer decks below. The main pumps thundered into life, sucking in water past the filters at the pipes’ ends. As it came aboard, the filtered water was fed immediately into a system of smaller pipes controlled by secondary pumps that passed it in carefully measured increments evenly into the tanks along
Prometheus
’s massive length.

In the cargo control room, displays automatically monitored the disposition of the cargo. Schematics of the ship lit up, each tank represented by a safe green box, as strategically located sensors read the forces unleashed by the movement of the liquid through the system. The greatest danger came from the shear force, that terrific tension that could arise at the junction of improperly laden tanks where the upward force of a
buoyant empty tank ran up against the downward force of a full one. Mistakes in lading could tear—had torn—tankers apart in seconds.

But Robin was far too competent a cargo-control officer to allow anything of the kind to happen. And in any case, the task of controlling the oncoming water as it passed relatively slowly along two basic channels was not one she would find particularly hard. She was used to calculating the shear forces unleashed when six or eight tanks were being loaded all at once. They stood side by side in silence until it was clear that the programs were coping successfully with the work. Then Richard looked at his watch. “The automatic alarms will ring here, in the engine room, and on the bridge if there’s a problem,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They took the watch at once, early. Richard crossed to the helm and relieved Weary with a clap on the shoulder that made the big man jump and look around, bewildered.

“Time for some rest, Doc,” he said.

The sound of his name stopped the frown of confusion on Doc’s face and he turned away with a grin to shamble over toward Chris, who was dozing on her feet by the collision alarm radar. Robin went over to C. J. Martyr, the only one of the watchkeepers truly awake. When she put her hand on his shoulder, he automatically rubbed it with his steel-stubbled jawline, a piece of easy intimacy as though she were as much of a daughter to him as was Christine.

“I’d never have believed he could have survived,” he rumbled, talking to Richard as much as to her. “And given that he did, I’d never have thought he would come back like this.”

The first
Prometheus
had been breaking up, splitting in two halfway down her long deck in a storm in the En-
glish Channel. Martyr and Robin had been out on that doomed deck together in pursuit of the man who had masterminded poisonings and murders to cover the illegal sale of her cargo, and the lethal attempts to have her sunk for insurance. That man had been the first officer, the captain’s godson, Ben Strong. When the ship had broken up, Richard, Salah, and the others had saved the two of them. And they had all seen Ben Strong, splayed on the forward section, whirled away to destruction as it had sunk. How could a man trapped in such a cataclysm, sucked down to such an end, return ten years later to take his mad revenge? Or, more correctly from the look of things, to make the settling of his account with Heritage Mariner a part of his larger plan.

For it was clear enough, and had been from the outset as they looked back on it, now wise with hindsight, that the pirating of
Prometheus II
was almost incidental to the overall plan. A ruse to keep the eyes of the world on one end of the Gulf while the real work went on at the other. Preoccupied with the drama at Bushehr, who had given a second thought to Fate? The planning behind it, the preparation, and the cunning were deeply disturbing. Perhaps the cunning most of all. While they were on Fate, waiting for a lost ship, unaware that she would never come, the terrorists’ defenses were at their lowest, and Richard’s plan stood a chance. But the moment they realized that
Dawn of Freedom
was not coming, the instant that they realized that something had gone wrong—anything at all—such a well-prepared, clever team as Ben Strong had assembled would be bound to come up with an equally effective alternative. And once they did that, the whole world was likely to be helpless, as it had been in the affair so far. And then what hope would the team on
Prometheus
stand? Eight desperate people undermanning a half-empty supertanker.