The Fire Ship (3 page)

It would do. Without further thought, she took the rope at the nearest end and pulled it toward her. The box lifted easily but proved to be heavy and unwieldy. Only desperation gave her the strength to get it up onto the table so that it leaned on the mattress. Then it was easy enough to slide it up onto the window frame and guide it down onto the deck outside. She leaned out of the window and invested a few more seconds in tilting the box until it fell safely onto its side.

She had followed it up until she was standing on the desk and she turned sideways now, hesitating no longer. She hunched herself over and slid astride the window frame, putting her full weight onto the mattress. There was a tearing sensation on the back of her right thigh. Something scraped across her shoulders. She could sense the glass cutting its way through the bedding toward her as she reached down for the box with her foot.

Then she was free, pausing, her full weight on the box, swinging her other leg down, looking back in through the window—but only for the briefest second. The cabin door exploded in, burned through. The wardrobe vanished. A cloud of flame roared hungrily along the ceiling. In her haste to avoid it, she leaped back and stumbled onto the deck. On one knee by the box, she
saw that it had burst open when she dropped it. Inside there were four long guns, magazines, and ammunition boxes.

At once her hands were busy closing the box. Then she grabbed the handle again and began to lug it toward the ladder.

Behind her the whole sterncastle burst into flame, but luckily, most of the force of the explosion went up. A breeze from hell itself seemed to waft around her, then she was free of that, too, and racing forward.

“Robin! What on earth!”

Richard and Sam Hood came tearing out of the bridge and sprinted toward her. They were close-by and yelling, yet she could only just hear them. “What is that?” called Richard as he neared. His shoulder came by hers, his strong arms reaching back.

“Rifles,” she said. “Russian…”

“Kalashnikhovs?” Richard fitted his guess seamlessly into hers.

“Probably Czech,” chimed in Hood.

“With ammunition…”

“That’s cool. Let’s take them.”

“What on earth d’you think I’m trying to do!”

So the three of them ran the case of rifles over to the ladder. Hood went down first, then the other two lowered the long box to him.

Then, even as Richard and Robin stepped aboard, Weary gunned the engine. While
Katapult
thudded into a cross sea, slowly pulling clear, they stowed what they had found in the lazarette. Moments later, Hood was helping Weary to set the computer. The sail motors whined as the huge sails extended themselves fore and aft out of the gleaming blade of the mast, then the Australian spun the wheel, letting
Katapult
lean into the first strong gust of evening wind. She came alive at once and
began to skim away. The four of them breathed a sigh of relief, looking back at last.

Sunset was turning the haze from silver to gold but the incessant spume spun up by the monsoon made the air still heavy. The lingering afternoon heat made the sea seethe and boil even now. They seemed to be sailing through a gargantuan alchemist’s limbeck where the base metal of the nameless ship was being magically transmuted into gold. And even as they looked back, the long mystical spell reached fruition and the black bulk of the freighter vanished into the white-gold heart of an earthbound sun, like a great bubble of tar exploding into flame.

Struck dumb by the unexpected ferocity of it, they could only gape at the blinding rift in nature where the freighter once had been. Incredibly fast, the power of the explosion overtook them: the light first, moving fastest, dazzling even tight-closed eyes; the sound next, a cataclysmic detonation, flat, almost solid, like an ax blade to the ears. Then a maelstrom of power as the force of the explosion, twisting through the air, tearing through the water, brought the first flying detritus, the first great wave to them.

Then, for an immeasurable space of time it was as though they were in the grip of a typhoon, pitched this way and that, battered by solid air, rocklike water, steel-sharp wreckage.

They could do nothing other than crouch on the floor of the cockpit, clinging to each other, with Richard protecting Robin, waiting for it—one way or another—to end.

The Gulf. Off Kharg Island. 08:00 hrs. Local Time.

The roar of a Bell 126 throttling back to alight on a helipad at the Kharg airstrip drowned out what he was saying. John Higgins, captain of
Prometheus II,
flagship of the Heritage Mariner tanker fleet, turned away, driving his fist in rage onto the teak rail that stood along the front of the port bridge wing. The thunder of the jet helicopter’s engine was a boon: he had been shouting and this would cover it. He was losing his temper far too much of late. And captains who found themselves yelling at anyone in this heat—especially at their own first officers—would be lucky to stay the course, let alone be posted senior captain, effective admiral of the fleet, as John planned on being.

The helicopter, a blinding speck in the dazzling haze, settled away onto the great gray black monstrosity of the refinery-island, dragging its noise with it, sluggishly over the Gulf. John turned back to face the subject of his ire, Lieutenant Cecil Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer,
Prometheus.
Behind the captain’s immaculate shoulder, fifty feet down, the main deck of the tanker stretched away to the forecastle head. The green, pipe-covered expanse of it was crawling with G.P. seamen in white overalls and officers in white uniforms all working in
concert. At a tank top halfway down the deck in the ineffective shade of a Sampson post clustered a group of figures with cylinders and backpacks. Around them, in pattern, stretching across and along the deck, more men looked earnestly into the black dots of open Butterworth plates, down into the empty tank.

John could sense the intensity of preparations for getting his ship under way. It filled the furnace air all around him. He knew where each crew member was and what he or she was doing. The activity seemed almost anarchic, but in fact it was not. One team was completing a thorough internal check of a troublesome empty tank—a matter of some urgency as
Prometheus
had mysteriously been moved to the head of the line of empty tankers waiting to take on a load of oil. She would begin loading tonight. The others—deck and engineering officers alike—were preparing to receive the oil aboard. Only those on watch were at tasks unrelated to the cargo’s reception.

Only those on watch and First Lieutenant Cecil Smyke. Cecil stood, pale as a ghost, copper ringlets tarnished with sweat, round brown eyes narrowed by more than the glare, aristocratic face lined by more than centuries of breeding. Of all the times to get hung over to the point of incapacity, he had chosen the very worst.

“I warned you,” began his captain once again, his anger just under control now, “I warned you last night, Number One. If you want to play your stupid, juvenile games aboard my ship, be
sure,
be
certain,
they do not interfere with your duty!”

Smyke wavered slightly, a tall, thin figure in a silk dressing-gown. He kept his thin lips pressed closely together, all too aware of what might happen if he allowed them to part for an instant.

“Now look at us,” stormed the captain. “We still
haven’t finished checking that blasted tank. We’re expected to move to the head of the queue, preferably without bumping into any of those poor beggars who have been stewing here for the better part of a month, and begin to take on a full load of crude in twelve hours’ time. With all the attendant paperwork. We have as a matter of
some
urgency to get stocked up for a return journey to Europort—a journey that is likely to start in a couple of days’ time. With all the damn paperwork that goes with it. And I have a first officer who cannot even
stand up straight
!”

This was, perhaps, a bit unfair, thought the captain wryly: the idiot was making almost heroic efforts to stand up straight. John Higgins prowled around him exuding outrage.

“
You
should be going down number-four tank but you’re sick instead.” The list of difficulties this caused began to wash over Smyke altogether. He closed his eyes. He had never seen the easygoing Captain Higgins—a common little oik, thought Cecil, for all his seniority—so enraged. Never believed the captain could become so enraged. Whole new vistas opened up before him as he really took stock of John Higgins for the first time. Richard Mariner’s right hand, they said, blessed with some of the great man’s genius. Little John, they called him—and never mockingly; as though Richard Mariner were Robin Hood reborn. Smyke hadn’t really credited it. Until now.

What if Little John could see beneath the bravado to the real reason Smyke was not on duty this morning? What if this suddenly formidable man realized his first officer had got himself into this state precisely so he could avoid going down into the tank today?

Suddenly the ship’s emergency siren exploded in three short blasts: trouble in the tank. John Higgins
forgot all about his useless first officer and burst into the cool of the bridge at a run.

And behind him, on the bridge wing he had just vacated, Lieutenant Cecil Jolyon Carruthers Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer,
Prometheus
(ret.), opened his mouth to call out and threw up all over himself.

As he ran onto the bridge John looked down, automatically setting the stopwatch function on his wristwatch. He knew the bridge so well, and dictated the positioning of everything on it so precisely, that he did not need to look where he was going. The zeros flashed up, the hundredths spinning. Four minutes to go and every instant crucial. John’s mind was working as busily as the figures on his watch dial. Smyke was bloody useless. Everyone else was extra busy and would be slower because of it. Should he send Don Edwards, his third lieutenant? No, he’d better do it himself.
Hell!
it never rained but it…

He was through the bridge, past the collision alarm radar, round the central bank of instruments, and out into the bridge-deck corridor before the thought was completed. Kerem Khalil, senior general purpose seaman aboard, and unofficial chief petty officer, was standing by the lift holding the doors open. Shoulder to shoulder they leaped in. The little car was in motion almost before the doors were closed, while Kerem’s broad finger was still hovering over the A-deck button.

“Who’s called…” The words were torn from John like a curse. No one should be using this lift except the crash team. But it was Asha Quartermaine. She had called it from C deck where her cabin was. “Sorry,” she said, pushing her doctor’s bag in first, then straddling it. “Caught me with my pants down.”

Literally, thought John, his mind sidetracked to her for a moment. Unself-consciously, she stood in the elevator next to them buttoning up a white cotton boiler suit under which there seemed to be nothing but her powerful body. She must have been in the shower when the alarm sounded so she just leaped into the suit and some shoes and ran. The shoes were unlaced, the cotton suit threatening to go transparent where it was wet.

Asha swept the red mane of her hair out of her startling russet eyes. Her gaze met his and she grinned: an irresistible flash of strong white teeth. Then she was down on one knee tying her laces. She was the most extraordinary ship’s doctor John had ever sailed with but he could not imagine any other he would prefer to have with him now.

The lift reached A deck and the three of them burst out at a dead run. They sped out through the bulkhead door onto the main deck. Here for the first time they hesitated for an instant beside a rack of adult-size BMX bikes. Had the emergency happened farther away, they would have used these to speed down the quarter-mile of
Prometheus
’s deck. “No!” John made the decision at once. “Quicker to run!” He was off first but the other two kept up with him even though Asha still carried her doctor’s bag.

John checked his watch at the open tank top—
ninety seconds and ticking
—as the waiting seamen strapped oxygen tanks to their backs. Then his hands were in motion again, adjusting the face mask and holding the tank’s raised metal rim as he swung his brawny leg inside it, pushing his foot down onto the first step. Little more than two minutes left to find the second officer’s team and the chief engineer who was with them, and to find out what was wrong and to put it right. In any
ship’s hold a difficult task; in one of this ship’s tanks almost impossible.

The midship tank her captain was now entering, like an ancient miner going down some massive subterranean gallery, plunged nearly one hundred feet sheer to the keel. It was half the ship wide—more than one hundred feet again—and nearly one hundred fifty feet long. One and a half million cubic feet: volume enough to contain a modest cathederal. And, like a cathederal, it was divided into aisles, chapels, and choirs by great walls and buttresses of steel designed to stop the cargo from moving with too destructive a force; designed to stop it from tearing the ship apart. The buttresses reached in from the sides of the tank, broke away to become full columns here and there, plunging to the dark serrations of the floor where partial walls arose in series like giant pews facing invisible altars bow and stern, steel pews, eight, ten, twelve feet high. Each pew was pierced by holes but such were the demands of their dangerous, restless cargo that none of these could be made big enough to admit even the slimmest body wearing an oxygen tank.

One hundred seconds and counting.
John hesitated on the first balcony—scarcely bigger than a table—and glanced up from his watch. Asha was climbing down above him. He turned away; tore himself away: he could not pause to gaze up at her now. He crossed the platform with one stride and stepped out over space. The crash team followed him one by one. They were well practiced. With the exception of lifeboat drill, this was the most regularly rehearsed emergency. And the one everyone was most terrified of doing for real.

These thoughts served to take him across to the relative security of the steps down the tank’s sheer side, across the yawning gap he hated most. Pausing with the
familiar slick steel so warm and reassuring by his right shoulder, he paused for a micron to look back, then ran on downward with what he had seen still imprinted on his retina.

The ladder came vertically from the tank top to that tiny platform six feet square suspended impossibly in that cavernous vastness, lit simply by the vertical spotlight of Gulf brightness plunging down until it was dissipated by the darkness far above the tanker’s serrated floor. Out from that platform, moving at once into darkness, reappearing under increasingly vague pools of illumination from the open Butterworth plates—bright moons fading to faint stars in the vault of the roof beside the hard-edged sun of the tank top—came the one delicate arch of the steps he had just crossed. Light and dark they curved, like ballistic motion frozen in steel, down to the platform he had just vacated. Fifty feet—sixty, allowing for the slope—of steel step and steel rail looking like thread and seeming to sway as Asha began to cross toward him.

Two mins. thirty and counting
…He was only a third of the way down to the tank floor—and that floor was fifteen thousand square feet of sludgy, echoing maze with walls made out of steel. He plunged down the steps, running his right hand along the slick wall while his left held the banister, like a frightened child. He was gasping oxygen at a dangerous rate, almost feeling sympathy for Smyke, who needed oxygen for quite different reasons.

“…Dr. Quartermaine here. On platform two, descending. Over…”

Hell!
He had forgotten to check in. He bloodied his knuckles on the transmit button of his built-in radio. “Captain here. Past platform two, descending. Ten seconds ahead of you, Doctor.”

“Khalil here. On platform two. Five seconds behind Dr. Quartermaine, descending.”

“Dr. Quartermaine here. Who’s down there?”

“Deck here, Doctor, Cadet Perkins…”

“Captain here. All right, Mr. Perkins. I have the list.” He was relieved to be able to say it—it put him back in charge somehow. It was written on a plasticcoated notepad dangling from his oxygen tanks, both pad and tanks like those used by a deep-sea diver. It
was
very much like going diving, in fact, for the environment down here could be every bit as deadly as the most dangerous deeps of the ocean.

John did not pause on platform three, halfway down the staircase. Instead, prompted by Asha’s question, he scanned the list while he hurried deeper into the tank. Four familiar names registered in a flash. He had held the board so that he could see his watch at the same time and when he hit the transmit button by his left ear his voice was betraying increasing tension. “Captain here. Past platform three. Three minutes and counting. Doctor, about that list…”

A vagary of wind—the huge tank had its own microclimate—made the flesh stir on his naked forearms and abruptly he envied Asha the protection of her semitransparent cotton. No one could ever be quite sure what the air down here contained. It could be poisonous, corrosive, explosive—anything. Normally, under power, the empty tank would be full of inert gas from the ship’s engine pumped in here to smother the faintest possibility of a spark. And even that nonexplosive gas, protecting them from explosion, was nevertheless quite deadly. But there should be no inert gas in the tank now. Now they were at rest. Now the tank was full of air while the work on one of the automatic cleaners went ahead; of air and God knew what else.
John had expected to be waiting for days before
Prometheus
’s tanks were filled. He had taken the chance to pump the gas out of this tank, fill it with air, and send down the team to fix a faulty washer in it.

Air was in many ways the most dangerous thing of all to allow down here, for it contained oxygen, and that could combine with the hydrocarbon gasses oozing from the ever-present oil sludge to create the most lethal cocktail imaginable. It hung invisibly all around them in the darkness. It could lie low, like ground fog at sunset. It could sail high, deadly clouds floating under the night-black sky of the tank’s roof. It could form bubbles, discrete, absolute, where the concentration went from 0 percent to 100 percent in a millimeter. He had seen gas readers jump from
SAFE
to
DEADLY
in a step. And once you were trapped in one of those bubbles, you would be lucky to break free; the stuff clung like gaseous glue. But no matter what circumstances you started breathing the gas under, you had only four minutes of life left unless a crash team brought you oxygen. Yet it was impossible to work down here for any length of time wearing heavy breathing equipment. The team he was racing toward would have had breathing equipment with them but they would have been breathing the air unprotected as they worked.