The Fire Ship (5 page)

He stood, helpless. There was nothing he could do but wait for her to finish. He didn’t like it any more than she did. He was long past boys’ own adventures
now, in spite of what Bull had said. He could have done with some peace and quiet. They both could. He checked his watch. Coming up for four o’clock. They should have been wined and dined and well tucked down in his great four-poster bed at Cold Fell…

“There’s a flight at ten from Heathrow,” she said at last. “It’ll get you to Muharraq airport at eight tonight, Bahrain time.”

Muharraq. He paused at the top of the Boeing’s steps, shocked as always by the brutal impact of the heat. It was dark—had been for hours—and the yellow security lights of the international airport gave everything a sulfurous glare that went well with the temperature: it was like a minor hell. In the distance, beyond the buildings on his right, he could see the great flares blossoming from the rigs out on the Gulf. The whole world seemed to have ignited around him. He breathed in the thick atmosphere and it seemed to fill him instantly, pushing a trickle of sweat out of every single pore in his body. Even with his jacket off, he was nearly overwhelmed by it. Within two steps he had to move the carefully folded garment—the flesh on his arm beneath it was prickling with the heat. Thankfully it was only a short walk through the oil-smelling, shower-humid evening to the blessed coolness of the air-conditioned arrivals area. Once again, shock. Just as he had forgotten how hot the real air on this island could be, he had also forgotten how inhumanly cold the conditioned air felt in contrast. He quickly donned the soggy jacket that had been such an encumbrance only a second or two ago and buttoned up at once. Even then, he shivered as though in the grip of a Cumbrian winter.

Passport, baggage collection, and customs were formalities that hardly distracted him. He was through into
the great new arrivals hall within minutes, looking dazedly around, his thought processes slowed by exhaustion and jet lag, not knowing who—if anybody—would be there to meet him. Bull’s man from the High Commission, most likely, though the Diplomatic Service was kept pretty busy out here, what with receptions and parties and dinners and functions…

Heritage Mariner maintained an office in Manama, but it was one of three in the United Arab Emirates and the one man who ran them all—Angus El Kebir—was in Dubai at the moment.

Perhaps he had better get a cab.

Lost in memories of times long past when he had first got to know this island, when Muharraq was primarily an RAF base with a few little independent airlines shuttling supplies from one airfield to another, when old Neville Shute—Neville Norway, his real name—was out here working on his novel
Round the Bend,
when there had been a real sense of adventure to the Gulf, Bill Heritage drifted out into the stultifying night, carrying his own case, looking for a cab. He failed to hear his name being called over the announcement system. He paid no attention to the limousine with its CD license plates that had actually come to meet him. As he had done countless times before, he raised his hand to the driver of one of the great yellow Cadillac taxis and it pulled over to the curb beside him. He opened the back door and slung his baggage in before the driver could offer help. He climbed in after it. “Manama, please,” he said. “The Hilton, on Government Road…”

But even before he could finish his directions, the door he was closing was torn open again and he had one stunned glimpse of a shadowed body in battle fa-
tigues with a bright checked kaffiyah folded across its nose and mouth looming over him.

Beirut. He
had
to be in Beirut. That was all he could think. There was nothing in the room except the bed, a table, and a rickety chair. There were no identifiable sounds from outside. Nothing except a continuous, muffled, distant roar, but it sounded like traffic. Or artillery.

Perhaps when someone came he would learn more—but he doubted it. He had awoken in this dark room some unspecified time ago, in his shirtsleeves and trousers but with no shoes, no braces or belt, no watch, no luggage. It was dark, but only because there were no windows. He had groped his way to the bed, the table, the chair, the door. He had stood on the chair and searched high up on the walls. He had stood on the table and discovered nothing but an unyielding ceiling. He had listened at the door. Again he had heard only the distant roar. Now he lay on the bed and thought. He had been kidnapped. Certainly by Arab terrorists. Probably by the same Arab terrorists who held
Prometheus.
Which made it all look less like Bull’s “diplomatic traffic accident” after all. Yet he was not onboard
Prometheus.
He was not on a ship at all—there was no hum of alternators, no movement over the sea. And he was still in the Middle East; the temperature told him that. The heat confirmed it.

Christ! He hoped Helen wouldn’t worry too much.

Better not to think about that. Better not to think too much at all, actually.

Beirut seemed the best guess then. No doubt he would have plenty of time to test his hypothesis further.

Indian Ocean. Lat. 13° N. Long. 55° E.

“Give me the binoculars,” Robin demanded, her voice suddenly tense.

Richard didn’t hear her. Just at the moment she spoke, a sound, something more felt than heard, rumbled in his ears, distracting his attention from her and from his watch. He moved his head, concentrating on the sinister vibration in the air. Was it distant thunder? Was it something nearer, more threatening? He didn’t like it, whatever it was. He glanced up along the spotted skin of the fully extended sail to the blast-damaged wreck at the masthead: perhaps there was something wrong there. Weary hadn’t trusted that masthead even before flying debris had destroyed it all those hours ago during the destruction of that nameless ship, wrecking their communications equipment, necessitating the careful watch Robin and he were now keeping, perhaps doing more dangerous damage besides. Then Robin called again and he concentrated on her instead. “What did you say, darling?”

“Give me the binoculars. There’s something out there.”

He reached down into the rack where the field glasses were kept and gritted his teeth as the ache in his swol-
len elbow, like the damaged masthead a relic of the freighter’s death, flared into pain.

“Here.” He handed them up to her. She slung them round her neck, then gripped the glass windscreen by his head to steady herself. She carefully rearranged her stiff body until she was kneeling, painfully twisted to allow for the angle of
Katapult
’s deck.

Richard strained to follow the direction of her gaze, but he could see nothing. The ocean continued to come at them in an unvarying series of waves, each one banded like the one before with the faint, curving slick of oil they were still following. About ten yards wide and God alone knew how long, it stretched back like a ghostly, humpbacked road into the haze.

“Anything?”

They were speaking in hushed monosyllables not only because of fatigue. Robin had been sitting up on the cabin roof watching for hours in silence. Richard had the helm because he could stand easily where she could not. Hood and Weary were asleep below, Hood with a cracked rib and Weary with a great welt across the back of his skull. None of them had come through the explosion unscathed. Even crouching all together on the cockpit’s floor they had each been hurt in one way or another by that hard, hot rain of debris.

The subliminal rumble, half sound, half sensation, came again. Richard checked the damaged topworks once more. Letting his eyes follow the curved sails down, along the blade of the mast to the ball-and-socket joint where the whole mast sat in its steel mast-foot, just below the swellings that housed the retractable telescopic booms, three feet above the deck. He knew the mast was stepped in a ring of steel embracing the central hull at this point. Could there be anything wrong there? He frowned, trying to pick up that sound again.

Robin screwed the eyepieces of the binoculars into her eye sockets; they seemed to magnify the blinding dazzle without helping her to see farther at all. She dropped them and brushed the sweat out of her eyes with unaccustomed anger. Somehow, during the mayhem that had come so close to destroying even
Katapult,
all the men had ended up in a huddle on top of her. Their wounds were due to flying debris—her painfully twisted knee was due to their clumsy attempts at gallantry. She didn’t know whether she was more vexed with them for hurting her or with herself for being so ungrateful.

Katapult
smashed into a breaking crest and leaped playfully with what sounded like a roar of joy. She flexed automatically and gasped in pain. God! What a bunch of schoolboys! Here she was, perfectly capable of looking after herself, trying to maintain the last of her independence before motherhood shackled her down, and she found herself surrounded by a would-be James Bond and the Macho Twins. Great!

She pushed the binoculars back under her brows and suddenly forgot all about her rage. There it was—in full view, surprisingly close at hand. She fine-focused automatically, her breath suddenly short with excitement. Oil-smeared, battered, perhaps empty, certainly showing no sign of life at the moment, but at the near edge of the oil-track, thank God, it was less than a mile away.

“Richard, come starboard a point or two. There’s a lifeboat less than a mile ahead.”

“Any sign of life?” His excited voice lost in the rumble of a wave against
Katapult
’s flank.

Robin was scanning it carefully now. The ravaged lifeboat was low in the water, floating at a strange angle. One gunwale of the boat was lower than the other so that it showed one side, but not its contents. Beyond
that, nothing seemed wrong. Perhaps there was someone lying over on the lifeboat’s port side. Several people, their weight distributed unevenly, might make it ride like that. But Robin wasn’t convinced, her initial feeling of excitement killed by her common sense. More likely it was the wind playing tricks with an empty hull. Robin noticed the wind was freshening, pushing
Katapult
over more. Her starboard outrigger sank deeper, the narrow delta of the aquadynamic composite down deep enough to gain a green tinge from the foundations of a glassy wave. The threatening wind made Robin glance down from the lifeboat to consider the craft she was riding on.
Katapult
’s two outriggers curved out and forward athwart the raked mast plunging past hinges, where the shrouds were tethered, to enter the water on either side of
Katapult
’s lean central hull. Deep below the surface, the outriggers spread into two Concorde shapes that cut through the sea as efficiently as that great airplane hurtled through the sky, their angles controlled by the computer controlling
Katapult
herself. At the moment the electronic system kept her steady in the face of the freshening wind and the threatening chop.

Robin suddenly felt at risk up here on the deck. She swung round, licking the salt off her lips, hissing in sudden pain as she put her weight on her damaged leg. One step along the freeboard and she hopped in over the coaming down into the cockpit beside him.

“Shall I call the others?” she asked. “We may need their help.”

“Not yet.” His voice was distant.

“Rick…” She said his pet name almost shyly. It was something she almost never did in public and she sounded confused even in her own ears. Had her vexation taken her too far? Was he really angry with her?

She found herself embarrassed and unaccountably close to tears. She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes as though brushing sweat away, and looked back toward the lifeboat, disguising her momentary weakness, even from herself.

Katapult
lurched. Automatically she held on to the cockpit’s coaming, her left hand reaching out for Richard’s shoulder. The white, oil-blotched hulk of the lifeboat was still half a mile distant, but
Katapult
seemed to be picking up speed extremely quickly. There was a sudden series of clicks as the computer was forced to reset the outriggers and trim the sails, the clear mechanical sounds making it shockingly obvious just how much the noise of the wind and sea had grown in the last few minutes. Instinctively she tightened her grip on the thick, hard triangle of muscle behind his collarbone.
Katapult
lurched again and this time she felt something—a slap of wind on her cheek. The trimaran gathered even more way as though she were a racing car with the turbo kicking in. She heard the wheel slap into the palms of his hands and she felt his whole body tense. “God, Robin, she’s pulling hard. There’s something…”

“What is it?”

“Damned if I know.
Aach
…” He made a peculiarly Scottish sound of disgust, left over from his Edinburgh schooldays, and put the wheel right over, taking the way off her. The sail motors automatically gathered the sails in.
Katapult
’s mast leaped upright and they staggered into each other’s arms as the deck came level—surprised by how much heel there had been on her. As her speed decreased, so the wind seemed to pick up even more. “It’s probably nothing,” he said softly as he let her go. “Maybe a squall coming. I don’t know…”

Robin glanced away from the lifeboat and looked around carefully, but the depressing haze swirled round
Katapult,
almost willfully concealing everything. It was impossible to make out any cloud formations or see the telltale darkening of air and sea that foreshadowed changing weather. She glanced down into the black bowl of the dead radar—along with the radio and the masthead it was another casualty of the explosion.

The unusual movement of the air stopped.

Richard turned away and reached down to push the start button of the engine. Robin directed her gaze back to the lifeboat. Something was very wrong. Perhaps distance had disguised it. Certainly that errant freak of wind and the swirling haze had camouflaged it. But when one looked carefully, it was obvious that the boat was not sitting correctly in the water. It was angled up and away almost as if it were willfully trying to hide something from them.

Richard pushed the starter button, the engine coughed into life.
Katapult
began to slide forward again uneasily over the choppy water in that slightly ungainly fashion she had if anything other than the wind impelled her.

Without any good reason, Robin suddenly felt reluctant to get any closer to the lifeboat. She swung round toward Richard, half expecting him to be sharing her foreboding, but he was concentrating absolutely on guiding
Katapult
across the wind. He was half in love with the sleek vessel and worried about soiling one square inch of her dazzling white hull with the black taint of the dead ship’s lifeblood. The lifeboat was at the outer edge of the oil-slick and clearly Richard wanted to follow its track round, keeping clear of the oil, bringing only
Katapult
’s nose alongside the stricken boat. Someone would have to be out there on the farthest point of the bow to grab hold of the boat and secure it to
Katapult.

The thought of being out there, so near the boat and so far from the others, frightened her. In near panic, she found herself halfway to the stairs leading down to Weary and Hood. And yet it was that very fear that stopped her. She knew fear of old, knew it as well as most; and unvaryingly she met it and faced it. If she was frightened of doing something, she did it: that was the sort of person she was.

Let Hood and Weary sleep. She would take care of this. Robin walked back and snapped a boathook free of its retaining clips along the lazarette; then she used it as a sort of crutch to support her as she stepped back up onto the sloping foredeck. Forcing herself not to limp, she moved along the hull to the needlepoint bow. She had been here once or twice before, but only briefly and never alone. And it struck her forcefully how small the forepeak was, how terrifyingly close to the dangerous ocean.

Katapult
’s forward deck sloped down as well as in so that the low deck-railings seemed mere inches above the water. Waves were supposed to ride up over the sleek porpoise shape when the vessel was in full flight;
Katapult
’s designers had not worried about crew who would have to accept blue water washing over their feet as well as that vertiginous feeling that the tiny forepeak was a thin ledge at a very great height. It seemed impossible to Robin that she should become dizzy with vertigo when she was a foot or two above the surface of the sea, but her imagination left her in no doubt whatsoever that if she slipped she would fall—and fall and fall. The foresail was designed to furl or unfurl from the aerodynamic blade of the mast along a telescopic boom just as the mainsail did. They were both tucked safely into the mast now and the foredeck was innocent of any protrusion whatsoever. Even the motor winches and
the anchor, the retracting bowsprit designed to take a spinnaker, all the forward equipment lay contained below on a second foredeck just beneath her feet. There was nothing between her and the hungry sea but that derisory little safety rail. Around this she locked her left fist as though she were a cowhand astride a bucking bronco. Only then did she look up and out.

The side of the lifeboat winked at her from twenty feet away. Pitching over the waves, rolling in the gusts of wind, it nevertheless refused to show her what it contained. She heard only the roaring of the wind across the blade of the mast behind her, the tumble of the waves at the stern of the lifeboat, the sucking hiss of them at her feet. Then thunder—abruptly she looked up. The haze roiled weirdly in the distance dead ahead. It was growing thicker and darker there. Had the thunder come…

—the thunder of the wind across the ruined masthead eighty feet above her, real, tangible, putting her mind at rest.

She looked back down at the boat again. It was much nearer now, fifteen feet almost dead ahead and at last there was something…

The high white side rolled down suddenly, a freak wave running across the rest. It was a momentary thing, over in a flash, but surely she had seen…

“Hey, hello the boat!”

…yes, she was certain she had seen…

“Hello the lifeboat, can you hear me?
Hey!
”

…two or three figures. The outlines of some heads and shoulders clinging to the side.

Why didn’t they answer? Perhaps they were too exhausted. But she was certain of what she had seen. With rekindled excitement she let go of the safety rail and began to pull herself to her feet. It took her two painful
attempts to unlock the damaged knee, but as
Katapult
’s head creamed over the remaining ten feet toward the lifeboat, the glassy swell washing over Robin’s feet began to darken with oil-tar so she pulled herself to full height. Then she began to maneuver the unwieldy length of the boathook out toward the white gunwale before her.

But then another wave ran counter and for all her fortitude she began to scream.

It was full of corpses. They lay toppled on the bottom in a twisted pile in a range of attitudes that suggested they were reaching out in their last instant of life. And what they were reaching for remained. At the far side of the boat, frozen in the act of climbing aboard were five more men, their hands still entwined with the dead hands in the boat. Five figures, stark against the dazzling blue of the ocean, all of them clustered along the port side, their weight enough to give the boat its list, reaching with both arms inward, the gunwales snugly under their armpits, their dusky, bearded faces mottled, bloodless, as gray as the bridge of their stricken ship had been. Eyes staring blindly, mouths screaming silently. All but one looked straight at Robin; they had been dead for a day at least but were still howling for help. The last one, the stern-most of them, was looking away, staring down into the water behind him. What little Robin could see of his face wore the most terrible expression of all.