The Fire Ship (6 page)

He was staring down, horrified, frozen, in apparent fascination at the fact that his body ended just above the waterline. Another wave slammed into the far side of the doomed lifeboat, lifting the hanging figure high enough for Robin to see all too clearly where a shark had taken him off at the ribs like a chain saw.

She let the boathook slip into the ocean, turned, and
ran. All thought of challenging the fear was gone: nothing mattered except the overwhelming need to escape the horror of the sight. She sprinted back down
Katapult
’s deck, her wet shoes miraculously finding a clear path between the gathering hump of the cabin side and the low gunwale; her knee holding up uncomplainingly until she was back in the cockpit.

At her first cry, Richard cut the engine and spun the wheel back, taking
Katapult
’s head—and the person on it—away from whatever threatened. He was half out of the cockpit on his way to help when she brushed past him. He followed for a step or two, but she made it plain she needed no help. He returned to the starboard, therefore, to see what was to be done.

He had not put the wheel far enough over.
Katapult
had not moved away from the lifeboat, but collided with it at a glancing angle and gathered it to herself, collecting it like an errant chick under the wing of her starboard outrigger. Richard froze with horror; nausea threatened to overcome him and he turned away, haunted by the gentle
thump, thump, thump
of the lifeboat.

The afternoon closed down on them in a dreadful silence; all sound and motion were driven from the face of the sea.
Thump
went the boat, and everything seemed to stop.

A rumble of thunder, much nearer than any other.

Thump
went the lifeboat.

A faint whisper of wind came and grew in intensity. Something completely different from the monsoon they had been following so far. This was a dangerous wind, a wind with a purpose.

Katapult
heeled over. The lifeboat rattled and thumped between the hull and the outrigger. The dead men lying in her stirred; the dead men hanging at her side danced
merrily, holding hands as though they were playing a ghastly children’s game. Then the spray-mist that had hung over them for days began to clear, vanishing downwind as though rushing off to see what the wind was going to see.

Richard and Robin came out of their trances, both of them suddenly very cold indeed. Their eyes met and they were in action at once, everything else forgotten. Something was very wrong here and this was no time to be sqeamish: they had to search the lifeboat and then get
Katapult
away from here as quickly as they could.

Richard gave her a hand as she hopped up and out along the runway again. By good fortune,
Katapult
had snagged the boathook as well as the boat, so Robin concentrated on that, on the bright orange buoyancy handle at its end with its wrist-loop for safety. She plunged her hand into the icy ripples and caught it first time. Then she pushed its bright hook into the stern of the restless little boat and leaned back, holding it still, keeping her eyes closed tight.

It was only now that Richard seriously thought about calling the other two. Searching a twenty-foot lifeboat containing more than ten dead bodies was not something one person could do efficiently or quickly. And the need for speed was suddenly impressed on him. The stern-most of the upright figures seemed suddenly to move. Richard looked up, shocked out of his meditation, in time to see a battered cap fly off the figure’s frozen head and spin away, carried by the same eerie wind through which the ripples were running and the oily spume was beginning to fly.

Whatever was happening, whatever squall was coming down on them, he would awaken the others only when he was ready to get
Katapult
under way. Either he looked in the lifeboat now or nobody would ever look
in it. He had hesitated for less than a second and he moved.

Even as he stepped down into the floating charnel house of the lifeboat, one thing became obvious—this boat had also been strafed. Strafed from wave-top level. The scene came vividly alive in his mind’s eye: the huddle of men trying to pull their shipmates aboard, the bullets going among them, the remorseless sharks coming. His face expressionless, Richard secured a line to
Katapult
’s low rail and began to check more carefully. There were no documents, no radio or navigation equipment in sight. But the corpses were clustered—piled—in the bottom of the lifeboat, their arms reaching upward like the tentacles of sea anemones, seeming to wave in the rising wind. If he wanted to check further and get at any of the lockers, he would have to undertake the grim business of moving them.

The most obvious place to start was at the stern, where the fewest corpses and the largest lockers were. He began to move down the boat and found his attention caught not by the corpses but by Robin, toward whom he was moving. The sight of her called to him and he made his way toward her carefully. At the stern, he paused, holding the lower end of the boathook and looking up along its length at the beloved figure standing mere feet away tense and strong, her eyes closed, her face blank. A feeling of love and pride overwhelmed him and, had she not been beyond his reach he would have held her tightly to him.

Then something forced his eyes to look past her, downwind, to the place toward which the haze and spray were rushing. In that instant, the mist was plucked away.

And the monster was revealed.

“Oh, my God!”

He shook the boathook and she jumped awake. “Robin! Get below! Get Weary and Hood.
Now!
”

Jesus! How could he not have known? How could he not even have suspected? The wind, the mist, the spume, everything, not blown but
sucked.
Sucked into the roaring, thunderous gyre of it. Sucked to whatever eternity awaited at the other end of it.

Robin dropped the boathook on the cockpit sole and started to run below—when she caught her first glimpse of its broad white shoulder whipping into its flat black cloud-base head. With wondering eyes she traced the sinuous, sinister curve of it down, down inexorably to the broad foot, wreathed in madly dancing spray. And suddenly she became aware of just how
solid
the air felt streaming so rapidly past her; and how swiftly and forcefully it was taking
Katapult
along with it.

“Dear God!” she breathed and hit the cabin door.

It was dark and hot, quiet and still—a numbing contrast to the increasing bedlam above. Once through the door she had to force herself to further motion. An outrageous idea came that she could just curl up down here with the men she had come to fetch, pull the blankets safely over her head, and hide…

She hit the light switch.

Both men had collapsed on the long bench-seats on either side of the central table without even bothering to open out the bunks. Neither one stirred at the sudden brightness; they were insulated by exhaustion from light as well as from the ungainly motion of the yacht and the growing din of the wind. Weary was closest. Without further thought, she ran across to him on suddenly unsteady feet.

He was lying, fully dressed, on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, laid out like a dead man. Two
strides took her up the length of him and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wake up!” she called. His headband was crushed into his long right hand like a child’s security blanket. His curly hair fell forward in a cowlick into his restless, sleeping eyes. “Come on!” she insisted, shaking him with all her might. “Wake up, damn it!”

And his eyes flew open.

She had never seen anything like it in her life. The eyes opened, deep blue and every bit as fathomless as the waterspout outside, sucking at something inside her with the same relentless intensity.

His hands were on her shoulders just as hers were on his, shaking her as she was shaking him. And he was screaming at her as well, screaming as his body shot upright. She had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes. “Who am I?” yelled Weary at her.

There was no knowledge in those eyes, no recognition. Nothing. They were the eyes of a terrified child, one who does not even know why it feels fear. “Who am I?” Weary screamed. And Robin was stunned, rendered completely helpless by the shock of it.

Weary was sitting completely upright now, shaking his head from side to side. The hair flew out of his eyes to show his forehead, high, white, pinched in impossibly at the temples.

No. Not pinched in. Crushed in.

She was unable to tear herself away from his demented gaze. The last thing she saw before Hood hit her, out of the corner of her eye, was Weary’s left temple, caved in to a shadowed hollow, starred with bright red scar tissue.

As soon as Robin leaped into action, Richard turned, too. The lifeboat began to pitch severely as soon as the
boathook was free, hurling itself back against the bow rope like a willful puppy fighting a leash. The movement made it hard for him to work, but he refused to give up even now. Brutally, for time was too short for him to show proper respect, he heaved the sternmost bodies away, uncovering the lockers. His eyes still busy among the filthy, oozing, twisted pile for any scraps of information, any telltale personal possessions they might have brought with them. More than one dead fist clasped a worn Koran, but that was all. He heaved them aside and tore the doors open. The stern lockers revealed nothing more than a bilgelike well reaching down to the keel, full of seawater, blood, and excrement. He straightened.

The great white whiplash of the waterspout seemed to leap toward him as he moved. The wind howled louder, plucking back stinging spray from the white horses that suddenly surrounded him, its strength roaring up the Beaufort scale with inconceivable rapidity. Hell! Where were Weary, Hood, and Robin?

He turned, spreading his feet to gain stability, and then a hand grasped at his leg.

Hood hit Robin in a sort of American football charge, knocking her back onto the seat. Then he was sitting opposite Weary where she had been. He was saying something in a repeated, gentle monotone, voice lazy and hands busy. “You’re Doc,” he was saying. “It’s okay. It’s cool. You’re Doc and you’re all right.” As he talked his fingers loosened the Australian’s grip on the sweatband, easing the bright elastic toweling free.

“It’s fine, Doc. No sweat. You are Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen…”

As soon as the sweatband was clear, he began to
stroke Weary’s hair back as a mother does with a child, as a horseman soothes a frightened foal. The forehead he revealed was huge, bone white, almost false.

Jesus Christ! thought Robin, it’s…

And then it was gone. Hood was fixing the sweatband round Weary’s head, hiding the hideous scars at his temples, concealing the huge bulge of that forehead. And suddenly there were two voices reciting the simple catechism, “Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight.” And Hood was turning toward her while Weary’s hands went to that huge, wounded head of his.

“What’s up, doll?” The light normality of his tone shocked her back to reality more quickly than anything else could have done.

“Waterspout, dead ahead,” she said.

Richard actually cried out aloud with shock, his own left hand reaching down at lightning speed, closing over a cold, hard hand. One of the corpses, moved by the rocking of the boat, had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard’s clothing. The material of his trousers twisted through a frozen, insensible grasp. The very movement of something as cold and clammy as this caused him to step back with revulsion.

The last body tilted over, raising its hand in a bizarre simulation of a cheerful wave. The next man to him, unseeing eyes fixed on Richard’s, seemed to revive too, as the whole boat, unbalanced by Richard’s abrupt movement, rocked. Richard fell to his knees. And the moment that he did so, something caught his eye. At the bottom of the pile of corpses lay that of a slim figure—almost a boy, hardly a man. Most of his head was missing, but his body was unmarked. It was hunched over, with its back to Richard, but it suddenly stood out from
the rest because it was wearing a uniform jacket. Not a deck officer’s or an engineer’s, Richard tugged the khaki shoulder, but the corpse refused to move. Richard glanced over his own shoulder, suddenly desperate. The waterspout was getting too close for comfort and there was still no sign of Robin, Hood, or Weary. He tugged again at the dead man’s shoulder.

The body abruptly turned over as if giving up the fight. In the sodden breast pocket was a blotched white radio message. Richard knelt carefully, angling his body to give maximum protection from the wind, and opened it to look at once. It was written in sinuous Arabic script, as impenetrable as the writing on the crates in the dead ship’s hold had been. But the layout of the flimsy form was familiar enough. There was a space where the name of the ship should be entered. A space for the time. A space for the message. He glared at that first space with almost manic intensity, willing the strange curves of the writing indelibly into his memory. It was nothing more to him than a pattern of lines and dots. But it had to be the name of the doomed ship. The radio officer on every ship he had ever heard of filled in these forms in exactly the same way. This
had
to be the name of the ship. Then another thought sprang into his mind. If this was the radio officer, then…

He crumpled the message into his fist and leaned forward; at last he was rewarded. Under the boy’s legs, right at the bottom, providentially wrapped in plastic, was a radio. Richard leaned over, muscles in his legs, back, and belly jerking to keep him upright in the restless boat, and caught hold of it.

Just as he made this move, the next corpse at the boat’s side followed the other toward the waterspout, pulling the radio operator’s corpse upright as it did so.
A cold dead hand clutched at Richard’s face, stiff fingers driving at his eyes as if attempting to protect the precious radio. Richard reacted without conscious thought, driven by primitive instinct. He clutched at the icy forearm and pushed it away, grabbed the slimy shirtfront, and heaved the corpse overboard. It was only then that he realized how he had been betrayed; tricked by the dead men. The radio message had been wadded in the fist he had used to fight off the dead radio operator. As he released the shirtfront, so the flimsy paper slipped through his fingers, too, and the greedy wind snatched it immediately, whirling it away into the stormy sea.