The Fire Ship (9 page)

“One hundred and eighty-five miles due north of Manama Harbor,” said Robin, already at Walt’s shoulder, poring over the chart that was so much more up-to-date than the one in
Katapult
’s cabin: and it did have
Prometheus
’s present whereabouts precisely plotted on it, observed Richard as he joined them. Just on the edge of the bay there, under the eyes of the little Iranian airport—though there was no proof of any Iranian involvement or even suggestion of it, so far. As the admiral had said, anchored in about fifty feet of water.

Unladen then, almost certainly. Sitting high and hard to get aboard. Damned hard for armed men to board unsuspected…

He glanced up and found both of them watching
him, gray eyes and brown eyes alike alive with speculation.
Mississippi
corkscrewed. Foam thundered back along her starboard foredeck. Spray splattered onto the porthole glass beside him and foam hissed away into the scuppers. “If we could get aboard
Prometheus,
then we could begin to find out what is really going on,” he said. His voice was flat. Level. The throb of his rage just held in check by an iron effort of will.

Richard was fiercely aware that they were actually discussing a kind of war. A small war against an unknown enemy, waged by himself and such warriors as he could summon, fought with such weapons as he and they could find, against such armaments as the terrorists might hold, and to be fought on the decks of the flagship of his tanker fleet with more at risk than he dared to calculate.

“My hands are tied,” warned Admiral Stark. “No men or matériel. Not a gun. Not a round.”

“Radio?” asked Robin. “Our first meeting off Rass al Hadd should prove to you what a danger to shipping we are in our present state.”

“Done!” Stark grinned. His eyes, the image of his godson’s, sparkled with fierce joy at being able to help after all. “And now you come to mention it…”

Half an hour later, Walter Stark’s desk was piled high with the sort of equipment the enthusiastic, safety-conscious admiral thought to be essential for the protection of
Katapult
in her present condition from the dangers of shipping in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf.

A powerful, reliable radio. A portable switchboard with several portable VHF radiotelephone handsets. A sextant, very nearly the work of art that Richard remembered John Higgins always kept aboard
Prometheus,
and the admiral’s own since boyhood. A full range of charts, notices to mariners, and updates.

Stark surveyed the pile, then looked up cheerfully, catching the eye of the President’s portrait on the wall above the desk. Richard and Robin followed his gaze. “You know,” said the admiral, “I’ve a feeling he’s watching us fairly closely. Maybe I should have turned his picture to the wall…”—he rubbed his great, hard hands gleefully—“…but I’ll be damned if I think he would mind!”

“So there are four of us,” Richard was summing up after two long days’ worth of arguments. “Although for the life of me I don’t see why you and Doc want in on this, Sam.”

Hood, down in the cabin, hunched over his new toys, simply shrugged. Doc pretended not to hear, his eyes on the far horizon, the helm easy in his great hands.

“We’ve enough equipment to navigate to the moon…”

“Mars, if’n we want,” interjected Hood happily.

“…and back. One experimental trimaran, almost fully functional…”

“We can fix the radar easy given the equipment and the time,” said Weary. “Rest of the stuff’s fine.”

“…and six Kalashnikhov AK-47 assault rifles, old but unused,” Richard persisted.

“Fine guns,” said Robin. “Tough. Reliable.”

“And with this we propose to engage an unnumbered quantity of armed terrorists, possibly the whole of the Palestine Liberation Organization and conceivably the Iranians to boot.”

“So what else do we need?” asked Weary.

Richard opened his mouth, but it was Robin who answered: “
Help!
All the help we can get.”

It was thirty-six hours since
Mississippi
’s helicopter
had dropped them back onto
Katapult
’s lazarette. Thirtysix hours filled with an urgent drive to reach the Gulf as soon as possible. After one long, fast day’s sailing, they had anchored briefly in the anchorage area north of Muscat off the Omani coast. They had left on the dawn breeze this morning and a fitful southerly, sucked north by tremendous heat beginning to build in the desert fastnesses of Iran, had pushed them slowly another hundred miles up the coast. It had been a hot, hard, frustrating sail. Now, as the heat died, the darkness gathered, and the faltering wind began to ebb away, they were coming onto longitude 57 degrees east from Greenwich, latitude 25 degrees north of the equator, some fifty miles out from Fujayrah in the Gulf of Oman. Here, too, they proposed to anchor, if their still functioning echo-sounder could find them a bank or shoal a little nearer the surface than the deep water they had sailed all day. Then they could rest up for the long run through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf tomorrow.

The sun was setting on their port beam, bleeding down out of a lower sky gilded with flying sand. Even this far out, the wind blowing from Oman and the Emirates carried enough fine grains to itch scalps, gum eyes, tickle noses, and crunch between teeth. The air should have smelled of salt overlain with hints of sage and tamarisk from the desert. Instead it smelled of oil. The air here, all the way from Rass al Hadd to Shatt al Arab, always seemed to smell of oil.

Another huge tanker pushed inexorably past, long and low in the water ten miles to starboard heading south, her upper works a blaze of rose and ruby. A fleet of dhows, gull-winged, passed farther north, heading for the bay of Khawr Fakkan on the coattails of the wind that had deserted
Katapult
already.

“That’s it.” Weary drew his hand back through the riot of his hair above the sweatband on his forehead. Even in the beautiful sunset light, his face looked like his name: weary. And for once there was nothing about the evening he found to be new and exciting. “We either anchor here or go ahead under power. Hood? What does the sounder say?”

“Deep water,” came his reply from the cabin.

“Hell,” said Weary, not really wanting to do anything more. They were on the last of a low flood tide, however, drifting gently north anyway, with nothing seaborne in sight except the distant dhows and the vanishing tanker.

“You want me to take her, Doc?” asked Richard gently. “We can motor over toward Fujayrah. Maybe find an anchorage in ten miles or so.”

“We’ll see,” answered Doc. “Let’s get the sails off her first.” He hit the button. Slowly, jerkily at first, the motors turned. The booms telescoped in and the massive sails vanished into the mast, kicking off clouds of sand as they did so. In the heavy calm, the fine grains showered straight down, starting everyone sneezing except Hood, who was belowdecks. And so it was that he had to call up several times before he could be understood.

“Doc. There’s something registering. Doc. It’s dead ahead. A shoal of some kind I guess. Maybe a ridge. I don’t know. Doc? You asked for an anchorage. This looks like it.”

Half an hour later it was full night. The sky was low and heavy laden with massive stars. Above the distant desert visible through the portholes lay the promise of moonrise, its pale coolness mocking the heat of the air. All the ports and ventilators along
Katapult
’s sleek sides stood wide, but no hint of breeze came through to ease the
humidity in her main cabin as she lay idly at anchor there, as though painted under her riding lights. They had dined lightly off cold tinned meat and canned fruit, but most of it still lay unconsumed on the table before them. It was too hot to eat. It was too hot to do anything much except lie back across the bunks—now doubling as bench-seats around the table—and continue their discussion desultorily, already on the edge of sleep. Only Robin seemed to have any energy, and she was trying to interest the others in some serious planning of tomorrow’s course and what action lay beyond.

As Hood’s charts had been packed away, she pulled out the one she had brought back with her from the
Mississippi
and, using a plate of melting corned beef and a bowl of warm canned peaches, she spread it flat. “Look,” she said as she did so, “here we are, anchored about fifty miles off Fujayrah…” Her fingers traced the eastings and northings Hood had written in the log until they met at
Katapult
’s position on the chart. And suddenly she stopped speaking.

The others were slow to notice her silence. Weary and Hood were dozing. Only Richard was paying any kind of attention, and that was pretty scant. “Off Fujayrah. Yes? So?”

But Robin didn’t hear him. She was replotting their position on the chart carefully with rapt concentration, her blonde curls low above the paper. Richard frowned and sat forward, sensing something at once, even as her eyes, suddenly huge, met his across the blue- and sandcolored diagram. But it was not to Richard that she spoke.

“Hood,” she asked urgently, “how old was that chart you were using?”

“Dunno,” Hood answered without opening his eyes. “Part of an old set we got in the Seychelles when you
came aboard and we took off north. All our really new charts are of our home waters. Why?”

Richard read, upside-down, partly obscured by Robin’s finger,
DANGER. EXPLOSIVES DUMPING GROUND.
The words were written in urgent purple beside a dotted circle. A circle at whose heart they were now anchored.

“Maybe we should get the anchor up,” he suggested.

Hood and Weary both leaned forward, pulled out of somnolence by something in his tone. Suddenly they were all on their feet. Hood scooped the plates off the table and hurled the food through the porthole. Everything else went into the bunk beside him and the table was folded away. Then they were up the companion ladder and into the cockpit.

There was light coming from her instruments, through the portholes from the lamps below and from her riding lights above: enough light to see by, even out here. Richard ran easily down the length of her to the anchor chain at her head. It was a fine chain reaching down to a small flanged anchor a hundred or so feet below. Down to that innocent little anchor among all those dangerous, discarded explosives, he was thinking. There could be all sorts down there. In theory, they should all be carefully logged, recorded, made safe, placed in strong containers, and dropped deep. In fact, there was no real control. God alone knew what could be down there, in what sort of boxes, of what sort of age, in what sort of state.

He leaned out over the edge, reaching down to feel the chain, sitting snugly in the hawse hole by the extra deck just beneath him, where the winches were. It told him little enough.

“Engaging anchor-chain winch,” called Weary warningly.

“Clear!” Richard called back. Then he knelt up, holding the low rail at her head, straining to feel her anchor lift safely free of the seabed below him. He felt
Katapult
come round and heard the water chuckling against her as the winch took up the slack. He heard the chain begin to gather in, link by link. He waited for the rush, the steady rumble of the anchor being winched up.

But he waited in vain.

“Caught fast,” he called to Weary at last.

“Anchor caught fast,” agreed Weary. “I’m slacking off to try again.”

The second attempt was no more successful than the first. Weary slackened off once more and engaged the propeller, moving
Katapult
to a new position before engaging the winch. It made no difference. The anchor refused to budge. Richard returned along the length of the hull and jumped onto the lazarette. The top of the first rear hatch lifted easily enough and there was a torch handy to shine down past the case of Kalashnikhovs to where the diving equipment was. He had swum in the Gulf and knew about the sharks and the seasnakes there: he was suiting up and going armed. But he was going: someone had to. A half-hour swim, after all, might free the anchor, resecure it safely on the reef, put their minds at rest, and let them all get a decent night’s sleep. On the other hand, if they lost the anchor, it would be watch and watch from here to Bahrain, and no real sleep for days. At the moment, it seemed well worth the risk.

He was suited up and ready to go within minutes, the mouthpiece pushing cold air over his clenched teeth, his left hand holding a submarine torch and his right hand a spear gun. Secured round his waist was an assortment of crowbars looped over his weight belt and cinched tight by Robin’s robust strength. Weary tied
the end of a long, strong line just above it and Richard duck-walked to the edge of the cockpit. They hoisted him up and turned him round. He held his face mask in place as well as he could and tumbled backward into the oil-dark sea.

It was slack water. The currents around him were as still as the breezes above. It was no problem to hang in the water and test his torch, orienting himself carefully until he could see
Katapult
’s hull. Then he followed it to the anchor chain, careful to swim outside the sleek sweep of the starboard outrigger.

Once more he hung in the water, holding on to the chain with his right hand, half exasperated with himself for bringing the spear gun, which was in the way already, flashing the torch out into the threatening blackness all around. Nothing moved. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, Richard upended himself and began to follow the chain downward, head first.

Five minutes later his torch beam revealed a narrow trench into which the chain plunged, amid a jumble of boxes, seaweed-covered, barnacled, apparently dangerously ancient. He jerked to a halt, just in time. As he came upright, his flippers grazed the topmost box of the whole crazy pile. A stingray, disturbed by his arrival, lifted itself into lazy visibility and floated elegantly into the darkness.

Richard settled to the seabed and began to look around. It seemed that he was on some kind of hilltop, though his torch beam would not go far enough for him to be sure. A thin ridge scarcely wider than
Katapult
herself coming and going into the darkness on either hand. On either side of it, hillsides plunged down within scant feet to depths he could not begin to estimate. Diagonally across this ridge ran a thin crack,
perhaps a yard wide, apparently infinitely deep. Into this the anchor had fallen, and here it had wedged.