The Fire Ship (8 page)

He crashed forward onto the helm and thought it was a fluke in the wind—but no, it was Hood hammering at his numb back, moving up to replace Weary at his side. Then Robin was there, too, wedging herself between Hood and himself, hot as fire against his windchilled side. He glanced down to see Weary, crouched in the lee of their bodies, calculating the finest points of how to sail them out of this.

But even as he did so, the stresses on
Katapult
began to go beyond her limits. Inch by inch, against the dictates of helm and outriggers both, her mast came past the vertical and began to lean in. And slowly, inexorably, moved by a power beyond that of the four arms at the helm, her head started to come round. The port outrigger sank deeper beneath the streaming, windtorn surface. The other threatened to break free of the
surface and hurl them all to destruction. They began to climb up the hill of water toward the lethal heart of the thing. Richard closed his eyes, his concentration absolute, moving as one with Hood, never giving an inch, fighting the good fight. Robin was yelling something to him, lips hot against his ear, breath sweet on the thick salt air. Her meaning clear but her words gone in that awesome, overwhelming noise.

Then Weary was there, at their left, his hands closing over their left hands, forcing upward with all their combined might.

And the helm spun over. Hard. So hard they lost control of it and let it whirl like a Catherine wheel, hands clear, before they caught it again, the four of them, moving as one; caught it and held it and prayed.

As the blade of the mast, socketed in its mast-foot a yard above the deck, turned, turning the long line of the fore and after booms, turning the close-hauled blades of the straining sails against it, turning the whole screaming construction across the howling wind, and
Katapult
came round on the opposite tack, her head swinging right as though she had been punched, using the massive momentum the wind had given her to break free of its grip and mash through to the far side, away from the thing.

For that one split second they grazed the foot of the spray wall itself; then it was gone. The hurricane that had been roaring into their backs blasted into their faces, tearing their eyes, bulging their cheeks, filling their lungs like balloons. But
Katapult
’s sails were closehauled now, giving no surface for the air to catch, and she continued to beat across the wind straight and free while the waterspout diminished astern.

How long the four of them stood in that closely entwined knot at the helm they would never know. It was not something to be measured by clocks or chronome
ters. The moderation of the wind, the calming of the sea, the passing of the clouds, the rebirth of the sun. These things measured that time on a scale beyond mere minutes.

And when they came back down to earth from the almost mystical plane of their concentration, they found themselves in the heart of a crystal afternoon, fresh and bracing. Long blue seas ran down calmly toward Africa. The heart of the whispering breeze smelled of salt and ozone. The light was dazzling in its purity, glancing off a million mirror surfaces all around them from the rime of salt crystals caking everything on
Katapult
like ice.

But before they took even the first step toward cleaning down and tidying up their brave, strong vessel, they had one overwhelming duty to perform. Richard ripped the plastic sheeting off the radio, turned it on, and pressed
TRANSMIT.

“Hello, hello, Dubai…Damn! I hope this thing is working after all this…Hello, Dubai. This is Richard Mariner reporting from yacht
Katapult.
Can you hear me, Dubai…”

And the radio suddenly crackled into life. “…Heritage Mariner office, Dubai. Angus El Kebir reporting…Hear you strength four,
Katapult,
over…”

“This is Richard Mariner reporting from yacht
Katapult,
Indian Ocean. Uncertain of our position at this time. All well. Please inform Sir William Heritage Richard and Robin both well, over.”

“This is Angus El Kebir at head office in Dubai, Richard. I’m afraid I have some extremely bad news…”

Dubai. United Arab Emirates.

Angus El Kebir sat back from the radio at last and switched the power to
OFF.
In spite of the efficiency of his air-conditioning, he was running with sweat. In spite of its airy brightness, his Dubai office felt dark and cramped. It perched like an aerie atop one of those new dark-glass skyscrapers, towering against the hard blue Gulf sky, which overlooked the frenetic activity of the Creek. Part boatyard, part port, part market, the Creek was the heart of the city and the state. Heritage Mariner had offices here as inevitably as they kept their head office on Leadenhall in London, close to Lloyd’s at the heart of the Western world’s shipping industry.

Angus shook his great lion’s head, all russet beard and ruddy curls, and brought his clenched fist down on his desktop. Never had he heard Robin so upset or Richard so enraged. He had known them both for many years—he had been at school with Richard at Fettes College in Edinburgh—and not once before had he heard such anger, such desolation, in their voices.

Rising, he strode across to the long window of his office and looked down across the busy maritime spectacle of the Creek, but for once the lively view failed to thrill him; the bustle of commerce failed to bring ela
tion to his part-Arab and part-Scottish soul. Here was a bad situation brewing, showing every sign of growing worse—and here were his oldest and dearest friends trapped and raging like bears at a stake in the midst of it.

And himself, powerless to help more than he had done, feeling all that baseless burden of guilt belonging to the bearer of such bad news. His breath hissed between his tight-clenched teeth as he shared the overwhelming rage of his employers and friends, so far away, so helpless. If only he could have between his powerful hands something—or someone—whose destruction could ease his rage.

A timid tapping at the door intruded itself into his dark brooding. “Enter,” he snapped.

The quiet youth who was his assistant down here appeared, clutching a bundle of files. Angus thrust his hand out and the young man surrendered his bundle and fled. Still lost in rage, Angus crossed to his desk, threw them down, and hurled himself into his chair.

He had been dreading this moment almost as much as he had been dreading having to break the news to Richard and Robin. It was cruel that, after so many hours of waiting, the two moments should have come so close together. That now, while he was still gripped by the feelings arising out of talking to
Katapult,
these files should have arrived, giving full details of all the men and women he had just been discussing, lost on
Prometheus.

The force with which he had thrown them down had caused the top few to spill their contents, and it was in many ways apt that he should spend the next few minutes disentangling the lives of John Higgins, Asha Quartermaine, and Bob Stark.

They were the three on
Prometheus
to whom he was closest. He and John were old friends. They had first
met many years ago in the wake of the affair that had overtaken the first
Prometheus.
Looking at the photograph of the solid, dependable Manxman, Angus was forcibly reminded of his modest charm, his open friendliness. The black hair, neatly parted; the level, intelligent gaze from those calm brown eyes. The pipe, inevitably, at its jaunty angle, emphasizing the strength of the jaw. Little John, they called him, like Robin Hood’s Little John.

Bob Stark was a different kettle of fish. With his American film-star good looks, his Ivy League education, and his New England old-money family background, you expected to find him following in his father’s footsteps into politics. Or at least his uncle’s into the American Navy. But no. A love of marine engines and some vagaries of maritime chance had brought him to Heritage Mariner and he was content, for the moment, to remain. His photograph looked up at Angus quizzically, almost as though its subject had been surprised when it was taken. His blond eyebrows met the strawcolored cowlick, his eyes held an expression almost of incredulity. You expected a long straw to be dangling from the corner of that wide mouth, held firmly by a combination of those dazzling teeth and that square, impossibly wide jaw. Even from a far-faxed Polaroid, the charm of the man leaped out at you.

And Asha. He had known her only briefly, but had been as severely smitten as the other two. The facts in her file were scanty enough, names of parents in Dahran up the coast. Date of birth. Mention of a twin sister, Fatima. Education in England. Medical qualification in Edinburgh. Marriage to and divorce from Giles Quartermaine, the famous journalist. Russet eyes looked up at him from under hair as red as his own, but darker, richer. He threw the file away across the desk, unable to
stand having her gaze upon him when she was in trouble and he was powerless to help.

And the action brought to his attention something that he had failed to notice until now. At the bottom of the pile was one extra file, fatter than the others. Without further thought, he opened it and confronted himself with a photograph of the man he most respected in the world, after Richard Mariner. Sir William Heritage stared out of the old monochrome picture as though carved in granite, thin hair swept straight back, thin mouth uncompromising under the white clipped mustache. Proud eyes staring out of the photo, unflinching.

Angus drove his fist down again, and was surprised to discover that he was now holding a paper knife in it. The blunt brass point stabbed through the leather of his desktop, through the backing, glue, and mahogany. Oddly, the desk had been a gift from Sir William many years ago and the fact that he had defaced it now, for such a reason, was the last straw. Had his anger been hot before, now it was incandescent. And it was the merest candle flame, he acutely suspected, beside what Richard and Robin would be feeling.

Without further thought, he leaned forward and lifted the phone beside the still-quivering handle of the upright paper knife. “Get the international operator,” he ordered. “First I want to speak to New York. Then I want Beirut.”

Off Rass al Hadd.

They raced northeast at full speed, almost blind in the haze at the northernmost edge of the monsoon. Then Weary spun onto a new tack and they exploded out of a silver mist-wall into clear, calm air, straight under the bows of the USS
Mississippi.

It was stunningly sudden. One moment the multihull was hurling forward at incredible velocity in the deafening, blinding maelstrom. The next moment, even as the new tack began, the air was still, crystal, and furnacehot around them. The sea was choppy and mercuric, as though contained, boiling, in the crucible of the desert. And, approaching them at flank speed across it, warning sirens howling, came the great gray leviathan Iowa-class flagship of the American Sixth Fleet.

Weary froze, looking up at it. Richard, providentially beside him, drove the wheel to port, sending
Katapult
skipping out of the battleship’s way, over the confusion of wavelets toward Rass al Hadd.

The
Mississippi
’s cutwater sliced past
Katapult
’s stern. The sea heaved around the warship’s massive flanks and threw
Katapult
out of the way, then spread in a widening chevron, the largest waves in the choppy sea. In series to the east of her reached the ships under her
command, all of them racing in perfect formation dead south, whence
Katapult
had just come.

And even as the four of them, frozen in the cockpit, stared, the American Sixth Fleet vanished into the haze they had just emerged from, and, but for the patterns in the water, it was as though the lean warships had never existed. As though
Katapult
had always been alone here, drifting northeast across the restless chop in the humid heat, slack sails searching for a breath of breeze in the thick, hot air.

“Christ!” blasphemed Weary, disgusted. “That was too close!”

Hood’s hand slapped down on the radio and it suddenly jumped to life, emitting a frenzied shriek, which, had it come scant seconds earlier, would have warned them of their danger. The radio had been fading in and out for some time now. They had given up trying to regain contact with Angus El Kebir but had been relying on it as a makeshift substitute for their damaged radar and communications equipment by picking up any strong signals from ships in the vicinity. A reliance obviously misplaced.

Weary took the wheel back from Richard and swung
Katapult
’s eye a degree or two north. At once, almost as though his casual action had summoned it, a sluggish breeze kicked in behind them and an air of purpose returned to the sleek craft even as she wallowed over the last heave of
Mississippi
’s wake.

“We should have stopped her,” observed Richard, half seriously.

Robin nodded, following his thoughts with ease. The American admiral, officer commanding that fleet, was uncle and godfather to Bob Stark,
Prometheus
’s kidnapped chief engineer. But they already knew, from Angus’s increasingly faint messages over the last thirty-six hours,
that even closer family ties than that had failed to influence State’s current policy of noninterference in the Gulf. Bob Stark’s father, senior senator from Massachusetts and close friend to the President himself, had been met with charm, sympathy, and cold comfort at the White House.

A brittle calm descended on
Katapult
’s cockpit, compounded of reaction to the shock of near-collision, a corrosive feeling of helplessness and—in contrast—a sense of having taken one small step toward some as yet undefined goal. It was a strange, undecided sensation that accorded well with this unsettling sea.

Away southwest across the inshore traffic zones, the great red cliffs of Rass al Hadd wheeled aft as
Katapult
swung in toward the coast away from the busy deepwater sea lanes, and the long black hull of a supertanker, low and fully laden, loomed over the northern horizon, more like a force of nature than a man-made thing.

Then, “There’s another one dead aft as well,” called Robin softly, and all except Weary glanced back to see the still-shimmering mist-wall part like a curtain as the mountainous jut of another, unladen, tanker’s stem thrust out toward them, surprisingly close at hand. Awed by the massiveness of it, they watched as the VLCC gathered itself inexorably out of the haze. The first twenty vertical feet of its side, nearest the water, was dull rust red and banded with vague lading marks up to the sickly green of the Plimsoll line. The next forty feet were dead black, a basalt cliff thrusting through the sea. And when her bridge solidified out of the blinding mist, like a pallid block of flats seven clear stories above that, even the eighty sheer feet of
Katapult
’s mast was dwarfed.

At once the wind died, blocked by the massive bulk, leaving them to wallow once more, telltales drooping
dejectedly, in the doldrums of its huge wind shadow. Richard found himself shivering. From down here the sheer size of this machine—whose length could be measured in quarters of miles and whose height above the waterline could be counted in skyscraper stories and whose displacement could be weighed in quarters of millions of tons—was simply terrifying. He thought of the story he had so glibly told Hood about the felucca found wedged across the bows of his own tanker, the first
Prometheus,
and he remembered how they hadn’t even felt the impact of collision.

They were all so lost in their thoughts and the sheer scale of the tanker that they paid scant attention to the helicopter buzzing busily toward them low over the swells of its wake. Skipping over the sea it came, sullen sunlight blazing off the domed perspex of its windows. Only when the purposeful line of its flight path became obvious did Robin stir. “Hey,” she said. “Richard, are they coming over to us?”

“I believe they are…” Richard glanced over at Weary and Hood. They were both standing beside the wheel though neither of them had a hand on it—
Katapult
dead in the water until the tanker passed and the wind returned.

“Ahoy,
Katapult.
” The cry was almost lost in the helicopter’s own engine noise. None of them replied. The helicopter dropped its pert nose and arced toward them like a guided missile, darkening the water with the wind of its passage.

“Better get the sails off her, I think,” said Richard. Weary’s hand moved. The whine of the sail-furler began and was lost at once.

“AHOY,
KATAPULT.
IS CAPTAIN MARINER ABOARD?”

“HERE!” cried Richard and Robin together. They
both held captain’s papers. They both waved. The helicopter bore U.S. Navy markings—perhaps they were going to talk to Admiral Stark after all.

Within moments the helicopter was hovering little more than mast high above them,
Katapult
stirring uneasily in the downwash of the rotors. But the chopper had ridden over on the first breeze from behind the tanker and Weary let her head fall away until the wind was dead astern and the craft was sitting more comfortably.

Then, abruptly, there came a whine from the helicopter’s side high above. Something was being lowered toward them.

Richard leaped up onto the after-section of the deck and stood there, looking up, his eyes shaded against the glare. It was a harness on a long line. He caught it easily and strapped it around his torso with practiced ease. Then he paused.

Robin knelt on the bench looking back at him, thinking inconsequentially how romantic he was in his whites, legs spread against
Katapult
’s action, shirt collar up, crisp cotton molded to his lean, firm body by the wind, hair tousled wildly by the thundering gale of it. He grinned wolfishly at her—his first smile since the news had come in. He simply couldn’t resist: this was his idea of really good fun. For a moment it had managed to overcome that huge anger she had felt growing in him day by day since Angus had broken the news about her father and their ship. Emotion brought tears to her eyes and when he opened his arms she ran to him thinking only to hug him to her as tightly as possible.

He said something to her the moment their bodies met but his mouth was full of her hair and it sounded simply like, “Syrup.”

Syrupy or not, she thought fiercely, I love you, Richard Mariner; and she hugged him until her shoulder
joints popped. There was a click and a sudden pressure in the small of her back.

“Stand in the
stirrup,
” he yelled again, and, an intrepid horsewoman since her youth, she kicked her foot into the dangling metal automatically.

“Okay!” bellowed Richard, and they swung up and out.

She glanced down once, understanding, to see
Katapult
falling, spinning away on the silver, white-webbed sea. Then she buried her face in Richard’s chest and waited to be pulled aboard the helicopter.

As soon as the harness was unbuckled, Robin was off. She loved helicopters and, while Richard was content with his licenses to drive cars and command ships, Robin also held current licenses to fly small planes and helicopters, too. “Okay if I go on up?” she asked the bemused Navy man who had pulled them aboard. He nodded, still helping Richard with the straps and buckles, but she was already gone to crouch between the pilots’ seats, eyes avidly scanning the instruments and the view.

The monsoon closed around them at once, buffeting the little craft, causing it to swoop and dance, wrapping it in dazzling mist. Automatically Robin pulled out her sunglasses—a battered pair of flyer’s glasses with silvered mirror lenses—and slipped them on her nose. She didn’t even notice that the pilot and copilot wore identical protection. She crouched between them for all the world as though she really belonged there, a part of the crew herself.

Unlike Robin, Richard was glad to jump out of the helicopter onto the blustery afterdeck of the
Mississippi.
The sheer size of the old American warship almost tamed the monsoon seas she was steaming across, but every
now and then a trough would take her head and she would dip and roll, pitch and heave in a corkscrew motion, shouldering off a great hissing glacier of foam. It was quite enough to unsettle some of the nearby sailors, who glanced almost enviously at the rock-steady progress of the nearby tankers, but not enough to complicate the landing or to slow the Mariners as they ran after their escort up toward the steel-gray mountain of the bridge-house.

Admiral Walter Stark received them in his office. The three of them had first met five years ago in Cannes where his California-class cruiser
Baton Rouge,
then part of the Mediterranean fleet, had been welcoming visitors aboard. But they had known each other for much longer—ever since Bob Stark, his favorite nephew and godson, had joined the Heritage Mariner fleet as an engineer.

“Robin. Richard.” He rose and strode toward them from behind his tidily piled desk as soon as they came through the door. “This is a bad business in every way!” His square, craggy face was lined with concern. His intelligent, deep-set brown eyes full of sympathy. He had known Sir William Heritage since soon after the Second World War. His involvement in the affair could hardly have been more personal.

“Walt,” Richard said, shaking the American’s broad hand while Robin went on tiptoe to kiss his weathered cheek. Then the admiral’s eyes met those of their escort and the young officer was gone at once.

“Sit down, sit down. My steward’ll be in with coffee in a moment. I’d like to invite you to lunch, but if I did, God knows it’d be a long flight back to
Katapult.
”

Richard sat, suddenly almost overcome by the sensations of being back aboard a great steel-sided ship.
Katapult
for the last few days had been all rush and hiss, the
slightest vibration of sleek multihull through water, the rumble of her sails and the song of the wind in her stays.
Mississippi
was all throb and thrust—that corkscrew stagger in place of
Katapult
’s leap, the distant, unvarying rumble of the engine, the insistent, immediate throb of everything around him.

A sharp tap on the door preceded the entry of a lean young man bearing a trayful of cups and saucers. He swayed easily across to the admiral’s desk as
Mississippi
shuddered, apparently quite at ease while she dipped and heaved back; but when Robin accepted her coffee, she noticed a drop or two had been spilled and the simple fact of this brought to her mind Twelve Toes Ho, chief steward on
Prometheus,
a man who had never, to her knowledge, spilled a drop of anything he had ever carried. A man now, with all the others, held captive like her father. Perhaps even alongside her father. Her cheeks flushed with ill-contained rage. Her hands shook.

“Right,” said Admiral Stark as the steward closed the door. “Update. No change in your situation that I’m aware of. Helen Dufour at Heritage House in London still has no news of your father, Robin. Nobody has, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has his ear pretty close to the ground, so I’m told. Nobody knows where Bill is or who’s holding him. Beirut still seems the best bet, but the PLO isn’t talking and not even the Shi’ites are claiming any responsibility. We just have to hang on in there and wait.”

“But it has to be tied to the taking of
Prometheus
!” exploded Robin. “Nothing else makes any sense!”

“I agree with that,” snapped Richard. “We’ve been over and over this endlessly. It has to be part of a concerted effort. Blackmail of some kind.”

“But who by?” asked the admiral, his quiet drawl gentle, soothing the English couple’s too-evident anger.
“And to what end? What have you got that someone wants that badly? Who wants to hurt you and your company like this?”

“It could be anything, it could be nothing.” Robin now, reiterating parts of conversations shared with Richard, Hood, and Weary during the long haul north to Rass al Hadd. “If it was just one of them—either
Prometheus
or my father—then it might be bad luck. Nothing aimed specifically at us at all. But both together—there has to be a pattern.”

“Any more news about
Prometheus
?” asked Richard as soon as Robin fell silent.

“Nary a word. She’s been moved down the Gulf away from the shipping at Kharg Island. The last report I had was that she was in that little bay just north of Bushehr. Anchored in five to ten fathoms, according to my charts.” He gestured to the desk and Richard suddenly realized the chart was laid out there, ready to be consulted. But he had a chart of the Gulf in his head as accurate as any on paper. As he got up, he said, “That’s what, two hundred miles due north of Bahrain?”