The Fire Ship (11 page)

Richard lay at his ease on
Katapult
’s foredeck while the multihull lay safely at anchor. He was luxuriating in the illusory coolness of night while Weary worked below. Darkness was really little cooler than daylight here, but at least it allowed the freedom of partial nudity. Like Robin, he had spent each day since they had passed the Quoins and entered the Gulf wearing far too much clothing as protection from the sun. Now he lay on the cooling foredeck wearing only a pair of swimming trunks and perspiring freely. He remembered Noel Mostert’s description of darkness in this place, “Like sitting in the heat of a black sun.” Damn right, he thought. Sleep would have been out of the question, even had he not been waiting.

Katapult
had arrived in Manama and anchored at sunset. Robin and Hood had gone straight ashore, leaving Weary and Richard anchored out here, far enough away from the harbor itself to be fairly sure that the Bahraini customs would not ask what they were carrying. Bahrain remained a favorite landfall of his but he was well aware that not even that island state’s courteous authorities were likely to overlook six fully loaded Kalashnikhovs, several thousand rounds of ammunition, and four dozen thunderflash grenades.

So Robin had gone ashore like any innocent tourist
to take a shower and collect Angus El Kebir. Hood had gone to report officially about
Katapult
’s part in the explosion of that mysterious, nameless, burning ship and to turn over the radio and the copy of the Koran they had found aboard her. And to see what gossip could be collected in the port and in the Soukh. Not much, Richard guessed, and nothing at all that Angus would have missed.

So now he waited, watching the night around him and taking what he suspected would be his last welcome rest until this thing was over.

Katapult
’s “eyes” looked north, and so did Richard’s across the width of the Gulf toward Bushehr on the coast of Iran. Toward his pirated
Prometheus,
if Admiral Stark was correct. It was full night—had been so since half an hour after sunset—but it was not really dark. Before him lay uncounted oil rigs, as numerous, almost, as seaborne stars; each rig with its bright gas flare belching sooty yellow flames, each fiery flower indistinguishable from its reflection in the glassy surface beneath. In series, giving a kind of depth to the night, the flat galaxy of them spread away before him, flickering and dancing one and all, though moved by what forces Heaven alone knew. Certainly not by wind.

Above them, some real stars lay strewn across the sky, pallid in comparison. These were brightest overhead but faded into the distance until they were lost in cloud. For over Bushehr—above
Prometheus
herself perhaps—there was a thunderstorm. He could see the electrical power of it: flashes of brightness so dazzling in their intensity as to make him wince, even at this distance. The occasional discrete blue-white bolt arcing downward, burning itself into his retinas for seconds afterward. It was stunningly impressive—and the more so for being silent. There were few night sounds around him in any
case. No wind, not even enough to hum in
Katapult
’s rigging. No sound of humanity, for he was too far out to catch any bustle from the bright glow of Manama. There were no other boats near at hand. No rigs. Nothing. Apart from the slapping of wavelets on her hull, and an occasional unfathomable sea sound,
Katapult
lay at the heart of a total silence into which crept occasionally only the faintest echo of a hint of a whisper of distant thunder, so quiet it might almost be a dream.

Richard knew these desert storms of old. Spectacular pyrotechnics, mind-numbing cacophony if one was close by. And, strangely, no rain at all. Dry desert winds whirling damper cloud-bearing air to colossal heights, begetting the most stunning of tempests, and yet, no matter how heavily those clouds poured, every drop would have evaporated hundreds of feet from the parched ground. Just another little joke of the desert.

But the quiet and the solitude gave him time to think of more than climatology. The relative inaction of the last few days had weighed more heavily on him than even Robin suspected.
Katapult
had begun to seem like a trap; the failure of the radio was the last straw. He was far too sensible to blame himself for any of this—though Robin, he knew, her moods made strange by her pregnancy, was suffering pangs of survivor guilt. It was nothing more than coincidence that all this had happened while they were so far away from base, so completely out of touch. Or seemed to be nothing more at the moment. He regretted poignantly that he was not at the center of things in London. But then again, for all that he had been a passenger so far rather than a prime mover, he felt he was nearer the heart of things here where he was now. Certainly, if he had been in London, he would have been bound with red tape. Doing more, but achieving nothing. Never in his wildest dreams, if
he had been at home when it all blew up, would he ever have considered what he was planning now. Buccaneering across the Gulf armed to the teeth with illicit Russian guns and thunderflash grenades.

Suddenly there was a thump on the deck beside his head. He sat up, swinging round to see what was going on. Weary was standing behind him, by the mast. Richard looked down. Lying on the deck close at hand was one of the black disks he had just been thinking about.

“Don’t know what made me think of it,” Weary’s tone was conversational. He might have been talking about the weather. “Because they’d all dried off, I guess. When we were packing them away I thought I’d better try one. Can’t take anything for granted. And now seems as good a time as any.”

“Of course. Good idea. We’re far enough out. Try one now.”

Weary nodded. “Fact is, I have tried one, Richard. I’ve tried several. Brought this one up for you to try.”

Richard knew then, at once, and he actually gasped with shock. But he picked up the heavy little disk anyway, twisted the top, and threw it into the sea, counting to three as he did so. The water closed over it, and he recognized the mysterious sea-sound he had been listening to just now.

And nothing else happened. No explosion. Nothing.

Like two out of the three he had fired at the eel.

“Looks like it was a mixed batch you found,” said Weary. “Some disarmed. Some not. We pulled up the wrong box. Bad luck.”

“Okay,” said Richard quietly. He tried always to meet crisis with calm. “First, let’s see if there’s any way we can check the rest without detonating any live ones. Then we’ll have a think.”

They went through the boxful in silence. It soon
became obvious that each grenade, like the box they came in, had been marked with the letter X. And, it seemed, X meant they had all been disarmed. They were all useless.

They heard the buzz of the inflatable some time before it came alongside and so they had time to dress in flannels and shirts, and to be waiting silently on deck for the others to arrive. Hood jumped aboard cheerfully. Robin climbed up in a cloud of silk and soap, and Richard at once felt grimy as well as frustrated. What luck! he seethed silently. Angus boomed aboard sparking with energy and all thoughts other than those of action were driven from Richard’s head. After the briefest of pleasantries, they retired below to plan their next few moves in detail.

Richard chaired the meeting automatically, as a matter of course. “What we need,” he said as soon as they were all seated, “is a careful plan of campaign. Angus, you’ve been at the center of things so far, what’ve you arranged?”

“You want contacts made, action taken, or events expected?” asked Angus calmly, as though this were some humdrum board meeting and not a council of war.

“Start with events expected.”

“Okay. First, Martyr flies in from New York later tonight. He should arrive at Muharraq in two and a half hours’ time.”

“We’ll meet him,” decided Richard.

“I tried to contact Salah Malik but with no success at all. He may even be dead for all we know. Beirut…”

“Yes,” said Richard, a little too quickly, his eyes on Robin. “But we can keep trying. What about news?”

“Still nothing. It’s incredible, I know, but there has still been no word from anyone about either situation. We can’t even be certain that they are connected. But
we’ve been working on the assumption that they are…”

Richard’s eyes stayed on Robin as Angus detailed the conclusions he had reached with the help of Helen Dufour, Heritage Mariner, the International Maritime Bureau, and all their worldwide contacts. The same conclusions Richard and Robin had arrived at alone.

She sat, pale, tired, yet completely intrepid. The shower had gone some way toward restoring her but what seemed to be making the most difference was the white robe she had bought this evening in Manama. It was silken and flowing, covering her from neck to ankle—and so, obviously, perfect protection from the sun—but so light as to give an overwhelming impression of coolness. She had also bought a little hand-carved wooden fan and, as she waved it gently by her left cheek, she filled the whole cabin with the scent of sandalwood.

“Right,” he snapped again as Angus completed his report. “Action taken. This one’s mine, I think; have you taken any specific action I don’t know about, Angus?”

“No.”

“Okay. What we have is this. Thanks to the U.S. Navy, we have the communications system we need to mount a concerted attack on
Prometheus.
We have the transport we need. Armaments…” He broke off. Leave the useless grenades out of the calculations for the moment, he decided. “We have two trained soldiers: Sam and Weary here. Then we have me. Robin. You, Angus, and finally Martyr, when he arrives. I don’t envision us all going aboard, however. We need a backup system as well as a strike force, remember.”

“So, do we go in blind?” Angus leaned forward, part of the plan unhesitatingly.

“Not if I can help it. Fast, yes. Blind, no. I need to know exactly where
Prometheus
is. Admiral Stark has
helped there, but his information is several days old. I need an update. Ideally we need to know how many terrorists are aboard and where they are likely to be…”

“We can surmise a lot of that information,” chimed in Robin. “There are places where they would have to be…”

“That’s right,” said Richard. “And we could do with knowing what they have done with the crew. Are they just locked in their cabins or are they all together in some central location…”

“Depends on how many terrorists there are,” opined Robin. “They need men on the bridge. In the engine control room if they want to use the generators. They need patrols. Lookouts. If there are as few as, say, a dozen, the crew would have to be locked in some central location. They’d need more than twenty to police the cabins efficiently for any length of time.”

“A terrorist unit of more than twenty?” Hood’s tone was skeptical.

“Right. It’s likely to be a smaller unit than that. Twelve people, tops,” agreed Robin.

“So,
Prometheus
’s crew are likely to be in one central location,” said Angus. “Now where would that be, Richard?”

“If it was me,” Robin answered slowly, clearly having been thinking about this already, “I’d put them in the gym.”

Prometheus,
like most modern tankers, had a full range of leisure facilities. After all, she did not dock like a cargo ship and release the crew for shore leave during loading and unloading. She simply moved from terminal to terminal, hardly ever going nearer to the shore than ten miles out, filling and emptying her holds through great pipes in the sea. Crews aboard had no end of voyage to look forward to, simply a turnaround
leading to a return journey. Time after time. Under these circumstances, a library, a cinema, videotapes, radios, televisions, a swimming pool, and a gymnasium, as well as the more traditional haute-cuisine dining facilities and inevitable bars, became absolute necessities—bulwarks against the stultifying boredom that could dangerously blunt the edge of even the most able and experienced crew.

“Yes,” struck in Richard again. Caught up in the urgent practicalities of planning action, their minds unconsciously clicked into unison. Their words and phrases wove around each other like braided rope until there was neither one mind nor the other, but a union stronger than either. “The gym.”

“It’s the biggest usable room aboard.”

“Apart from the cinema.”

“But the cinema’s full of seats.”

“That’s right. Clear the equipment out of the gym…”

“Easy enough to do…”

“…Chuck it overboard if necessary…”

“…a waste, but it’d give you plenty of room.”

“Move in some tables and chairs.”

“Beds?”

“Bedding on the floor.”

“Right!”

“And you should be able to hold forty people in there. Easy to oversee. Easy to guard.”

“You’ve the boxes from the stage if you want some height.”

“And the parallel bars up the walls.”

“You could just take out the stewards in teams to get food and clear up.”

“Seamen to see to anything else that needed doing.”

“And some officers to oversee them, holding the rest as hostages against good behavior.”

“It’d work!” concluded Robin, face aglow with excitement, until she remembered she was describing the hell being suffered by some of her closest friends. More soberly, she added, “Well, I can’t see any other way…”

“Nor can I.” Richard sat back, massaging tired eyes.

“But you’re assuming,” said Angus, “that these people are well organized. Intelligent. That they know what they’re doing.”

“Yes,” said Richard. “I think we have to assume that.”

“So,” said Hood slowly, “your worst-case scenario goes like this. Ten or twelve heavily armed hostiles. Forecastle head watch. Bridge watch. Engine room watch. Two more watching the bulk of the crew in the ship’s gymnasium. Two more to oversee the cooking, tidying, toilet, what have you. Maybe two more to oversee the seamen if need be. Two backups. Leader or coordinator. Whatever. Yes; it’d work real sweet with twelve.”

“Twelve looking after forty,” chimed in Weary. “Not much rest. Damn little sleep. They’ll be getting tired. Jumpy. They’ve got to move soon or they’ve lost it. Fish or cut bait. I wonder what they’re waiting for?”