The Fire Ship (15 page)

At four they were off Rass al Kuh, a low, sandy point backed by depressing-looking mangroves and the helpless shrug of the Kuh i Mubarak rising three hundred feet behind. Jarshak Bay lay before them as the Iranian coast turned almost due east. “Helm alee,” called Weary and spun her onto the new tack. Sailing upwind like this, he preferred to keep the con himself. The configuration of the sails moved smoothly as the computer followed his orders. The foresail and main thundered onto new curves as the blade of the mast swung round on the joint at its foot, and everything clicked into place.
Katapult
leaned the opposite way. The coastline, dead ahead, wheeled majestically and began to fall away behind. At once they were back among the tankers and as they gathered speed down the new leg, so one of the monsters gathered itself out of the wind haze and began to ooze across their bows. Weary narrowed his eyes, judging the convergence of their courses, not wishing to let her head fall off even by as little as a point toward the north. Quite the reverse, in fact. So they clawed across and up the wind, pulling over fifteen knots, directly toward that black iron wall nearly a quarter of a mile long, low and formidable in the water ahead of them.

The tanker was fully laden and sat nearly twenty feet lower in the water than the empty
Prometheus.
Her decks were less than twenty feet above the sluggish water, therefore.
Katapult
’s damaged mast would be level with the rust-yellowed bridge-wings when they got close enough. Nor would they have to wait long before measuring the comparison. Weary, still in the midst of calculation, brought her head up one more degree to
the south, putting more speed on her but bringing her course dangerously convergent with the tanker’s. The rest of them gathered automatically to windward.
Katapult
had no trapezes, indeed her whole design was calculated to minimize the need for acrobatics from the crew—but her weather outrigger showed alarming signs of lifting out of the water, so it was natural that they should try to lend support. Christine, indeed, every bit as intrepid a sailor as her friend Robin Heritage, jumped out onto the outrigger itself. There she stood, holding on to the singing shroud while her father surreptitiously strengthened his hold upon her lifeline. The steady pressure of the gale whipped her hair loose from its ponytail. It tugged at her shirt, ballooning it one minute, molding it to her torso the next. The calculated danger excited her, taking her mind off Hood for a moment.

The supertanker’s massive hull was moving south past their course incredibly slowly while at the same time closing with them dangerously fast. Chris watched it dreamily, her mind lazily echoing the calculations Weary had already made. Most of her consciousness, however, was simply overwhelmed by the sensation of speed derived from being up here, reading the strain of
Katapult
’s movement through the wide-spread soles of her feet and the vibrato of the shroud in her hand. In spite of the fact that
Katapult
was nowhere near full speed, the tension formed between herself and the conflicting forces around her gave Chris the most exhilarating sensation she had ever experienced.

The raucous bellowing of the men’s voices spoiled it. Her eyes sprang open to discover the rear of the tanker’s bridge-wing sweeping by. Weary had judged the line to a nicety, but at the cost of bringing them almost within touching distance of the tanker’s stern. And it
seemed that all the crew were there, pressed up against the after-railings, leaning over, many with binoculars, looking at Christine’s erect, romantic, eminently feminine figure. Yelling incomprehensible but clearly pointed messages to her.

It was too much. The weight of her memory crashed back down upon her and she reacted, as she had trained herself to do, with anger. With a rage as powerful as the sensation they had just defiled. “Bastards!” she yelled up at them. She leaped easily inboard, her hands busy with her lifeline. As she tore it off, she found herself confronted by Hood, his hand half extended to steady her. “Don’t you touch me!” she spat, far beyond rational control. “Don’t you even look at me again.” The strength of the emotion on her face made that gentle man fall back, and she was gone, pushing past him, down the companionway.

“What’ve you done to her?” bellowed Martyr, replacing his daughter, dangerously close to Hood.

“Nothing!” But somehow the word didn’t seem true even as he said it. What he had seen made him feel guilty and that guilt colored the denial, making it a lie.

Without another word, C. J. Martyr reached for him. The huge New Englander would have taken him by the collar but neither man was wearing a shirt so he took him by the throat instead. Hood hesitated for a split second, tricked by the possibility that the old man had a right. What they had been through probably gave the Martyrs the right to punch the lights out of one guy in every five. But not him, he realized at last. Not Sam Hood. He brought his hands up between Martyr’s forearms, knocking them aside. The gesture of resistance, slight though it was, drove Martyr wild. He hurled himself forward.

The whole sequence of events from the moment
Martyr first attacked had taken up scant seconds. Sam was preoccupied by his part in the action. Weary, caught off guard by the whole matter, was still trying to balance what was happening in the cockpit with what was happening to
Katapult
as a whole. And the latter still demanded his attention, for the multihull was creaming at eighteen knots straight under the massive stern of the tanker, less than fifty feet from the churning maelstrom above its single screw. But then rational thought stopped altogether as the forces that controlled them all took over.

Just as they hit the first high swell of the tanker’s wake, newborn in that restless cavern below her overhanging counter, the twisting bodies of Hood and Martyr hit Doc and knocked him across the cockpit. As he fell, he tried to keep hold of the wheel and so he tumbled awkwardly and struck his massive head upon a stanchion. He fell back into the cockpit beside the two writhing bodies, rolled over, and lay still.

Katapult
pirouetted madly out of control. She spun into the tanker’s wake, outriggers threatening to tear themselves out of the water. The blade of the mainsail swung this way and that, threatening to rip its boom out of the mast. And, with a sound like a whiplash, the foresail tore free and flew overboard until brought up short by the last ten feet still firmly attached to the far end of the forward telescopic boom. The whole mast shivered to come down and only the steel shrouds held it together.

The bulk of the tanker, less than forty feet away now, began to suck at the helpless craft. It had created a vacuum in both wind and water because of its massiveness, and already
Katapult
was slewing over toward the suction of the thrashing propeller blade, preceded by the billowing dacron of the foresail. In all too few mo-
ments, it seemed, first the sail and then the craft herself would be sucked in and pulled under and chopped to bits.

This was the situation Christine found when she ran back up the companionway. Weary was out cold. Her father and Hood seemed to have fallen on top of each other, and neither of them could be counted on to help. The actual sequence of events never occurred to her. It simply looked as though something catastrophic had thrown them into confusion. She was in action at once. The foresail was gone by the board. Should she try to jettison it? She didn’t know how. Her first priority in any case was to get
Katapult
’s head round and force her out of the vacuum here. How quickly would she answer the helm? Especially with the sail out there? Again she didn’t know. Only one way to find out, she thought.

Katapult
’s momentum had carried her partway across the tanker’s wake and even as she reached the wheel, Chris could see the foresail begin to spread out down the back of a wave, as it slipped even farther toward the propeller, pulling
Katapult
’s head round after it. Without any more thought, she hit the sail furl buttons and both mechanisms kicked into life at once. Some very strange noises indeed began to come from the leading edge of the mast where there was no sail to be furled, but, good as gold, the boom began to telescope inward, pulling the floating sail along with it. But this of course only served to turn
Katapult
’s head more quickly. She needed power to put a stop to that. Chris spun the wheel over hard aport and hit the big red button to start the diesel. As soon as it kicked to life, she pulled the telegraph handle to full astern. Like a motorcar going into reverse,
Katapult
began to inch back and into the dead air, away from the suction of that great screw, along the line of least resistance.

As
Katapult
’s forward motion toward destruction slowed, Chris rose onto tiptoe, looking around for other shipping that might pose a threat, already planning ahead. If they went under, there was nothing she could do. But if they pulled free, she would need all the information she could get. The next tanker down the line was a good three miles behind. There was a big one inbound coming up, however, and she didn’t want to end up under that. If she did get them out of danger, therefore, she would have to turn around and motor back the way they had just come. She allowed herself one quick glance at the useless bundle of humanity on the cockpit sole. Jesus, she thought, men were a bloody nuisance. All over you when you didn’t want them, but the moment you needed some help…

Then she forgot them and concentrated on keeping
Katapult
easing back as the forward boom telescoped slowly down, pulling the heaving, twisting sail back out of harm’s way.

Her dad was the first one to make it to his feet, but he was still dazed and wasted time hanging on to her shoulder saying, “What…”

“Come on, Dad, snap out of it. Go and see to the foresail, will you?”

“What…” There was a bright streak of blood on his forehead at his hairline. She would have liked to have had time for sympathy. “Come on, damn it! We’re not out of this yet! Jesus!” She hardly ever swore. She didn’t smoke or drink. She held herself down hard all the time. But not now. She couldn’t afford to be quiet and controlled now if she were going to get them out of this alive. And, all of a sudden, she was surprised to discover how much she did want to survive. “Damn it, Dad, will you wake the hell up?”

But then Hood was there and his eyes were at least
clear. “The foresail,” she yelled at him. “Get the foresail out of the water before it gets tangled in the tanker’s screw!” He didn’t even pause. He saw as clearly as she did that this was their only hope.
Katapult
was almost dead in the water now while the pull of her own propeller fought the power of the tanker’s. “As soon as we have it in,” he yelled, grabbing her father and pushing him up onto the foredeck, “you hit full ahead and come to starboard.”

“I know what to do, for God’s sake! I just can’t do it until the sail is out of the fucking water!”

But she called it after their retreating backs and within moments they were both at the end of the retracted boom, pulling in the sodden sail, hand over hand. As the weight of it came out of the water, so
Katapult
at last began to make a little sternway. Chris took in a great juddering breath and kept it in, watching through slitted eyes as the wringing bundle on the deck grew and grew, straining to know the first moment she could ease the throttle slightly.
Katapult
’s diesel did not like running full throttle in reverse like this and was beginning to run dangerously rough. A little more sternway. She eased back slightly. The wild note dropped out of the engine sound, but the multihull hesitated again. Damn! If they would only hurry! Then she felt her head spring free and Hood, unnecessarily, shouted, “Go!”

As
Katapult,
at Chris’s command, began to move forward, starting to swing right as she moved, so the two men heaved the last of the sail out of the water and swung it up onto the running deck. The whole pile of it tumbled backward as they did so, exploding against the mast-foot and drenching Chris at the wheel. She was so busy spinning the helm hard over that she didn’t even notice. Oblivious to the fact that her shirt was
clinging to her like a second skin, she was completely caught up with the necessity of bringing
Katapult
round in the tightest possible U-turn and heading her, innocent of canvas now, back under the tanker’s stern toward the long shallow bay they had just tacked out of between Rass al Kuh and Jask.

Once again they came near the tanker. Once again the air was filled with the sound of male voices shouting indistinctly. But as they passed back into the wind shadow exactly astern of her, the quiet air suddenly made the sounds clearer. And Christine looked up, surprised to discover that there were no wolf whistles this time, only cheers.

Weary exploded awake jerking and writhing on the sole of the cockpit with such force it took two of them to hold him down. His huge, leonine head thrashed from side to side. His startlingly blue eyes rolled, empty of any knowledge. It was as though he were having a seizure. Christine wasn’t repulsed or disturbed at all. Quite the reverse. She had done this sort of thing before, helping the other inmates of the detox clinic. She wrapped both her arms round his right arm and hugged it to her, frowning with concentration while Sam went through what was clearly a ritual, reminding him who he was.

“Who’re you?” Doc’s bright blue eyes were suddenly fixed on Christine’s green ones. The massive head rose off the deck. His fist closed on her shirtfront, screwing it up until it seemed as though he would tear it off. He pulled until their faces were scant inches apart. She felt herself being sucked in. The irises shaded from the near white of the sky at dawn to the indigo of evening behind the first bright star.

“I’m Chris, and you’re Doc,” she said gently, calmly, joining in the therapy. “You’re Doc Weary.” And Doc knew who he was again.

And who they were: “Hi, Chris,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Hit your head.”

“Did I? I don’t remember. Jeez!” He began to struggle up. “What’s going on?” They let him go and he was on his feet at once, striding over to stand by the wheel, looking past the sodden mass of the foresail to the duncolored coast of Iran. Ras al Kuh was back on their port bow and the whole bay stretched out before them. Behind the flat water, a low series of sandbars elevated themselves into dunes before collapsing into swamps beyond. It was a dangerous lee shore, shallow and poorly charted; but it was all they had. Yelling explanations, recriminations, congratulations one to the other, they dropped the anchor, letting
Katapult
swing until she faced the wind and the hook took firm hold, leaving a couple of fathoms of clear water beneath them.

It was late afternoon by now, nearly five local time. They had little more than an hour of daylight to complete their damage check. The fiercest heat was going out of the day and the wind beginning to die down, but this was no cool evening nor any sort of an atmosphere for heavy work. Yet the work had to be done, and so they set to it.

First Doc climbed the mast using footholds so cleverly designed that those few visible seemed to perform an aerodynamic function. After a few moments’ close inspection he called down, “Sam, it looks quite fair up here.”

“No more damage?”

“Not even from switching it on after the sail ripped out?” Chris couldn’t believe it. She had had visions of the complete mechanism being destroyed by her desperate action.

“No. That wouldn’t do this system any harm.”

She started checking over the jumble of drying sail with her father, trying to put it into some kind of order
for ease of further handling. She had changed back into the bikini and if anyone had noticed, no one had made any remark. Up and down the front of the mast went Doc, peering into the thin vertical opening at the mechanism inside. At last he crouched down beside the joint with the telescopic boom. Chris moved up and crouched beside him, fascinated. No sooner did she do so than she felt a firm touch on her upper thigh. She jumped like a startled colt. Her whole body flinched. She looked up, eyes wide. But it was only Doc, preoccupied, trying to catch her attention, with no idea at all of the effect he was having on her. He was holding a stub of metal out for her to see. “Main masthead retaining clip,” he said. “What holds the top of the foresail in the furling mechanism. If it fails, the sail falls down. And look at it.”

He crouched closer, his left knee thrust between her thighs, to brush the front of her bikini. All his attention on the clip, moving it so that she could see how it was cracked from side to side.

“Design fault,” she said. “I’d sue the builder to hell and gone.”

“Too bloody true!” The grip on her thigh intensified; then it was gone as he levered himself erect. “Sam,” he called, striding past her. “Look at this. Ten-dollar clip nearly cost us a quarter-of-a-million-dollar boat. Can you believe it!”

By sunset he was back aloft, sitting in a makeshift boatswain’s chair secured by block and tackle to the damaged masthead. By 18:45, he was satisfied, and they rethreaded the sail back into the front of the mast, securing it safely into a spare set of clips. By 19:45, they were ready to sail again and by then the unusual meteorological physics of the day had been reversed by the relative coolness of the night. The Iranian desert, under clear skies, was little short of freezing; a brisk
“northeaster” sprang up to push them quickly south. In moments, Weary had plotted the rhumb line to the dumping ground and they were off again on a course slightly to the north of it, trusting the tide and weather to drift them safely into position above the explosives. Somehow, during all of this, the watches had changed their composition so that when Hood went below to prepare supper, the watch mate who accompanied him was Martyr.

Chris stood by Doc, shoulder to shoulder. Her eyes followed his in the practiced sweep from instruments to water ahead. And they needed to keep a keen-eyed watch. They were showing running lights, as were most of the other ships in the dark gulf, but there might be some coastal craft in the vicinity who didn’t bother with such niceties. The tankers, every one of them showing the legally required running lights and additional lighting, nevertheless posed a more subtle threat. They were so large, and were, as usual, following in such close sequence that it was possible—no, disturbingly easy—to become confused by the distance between bow and stern lights, and try to sail through the middle of the tanker itself rather than before or behind it. This danger was compounded by the absence of deck lights or any lights visible in the heavily curtained bridge-houses except the dimly illuminated navigation bridges themselves. And, of course, almost all the tankers’ hulls were black, making them absolutely invisible in the dark.

Total concentration was needed at all times. But in the way of practiced sailors, they kept up a conversation at the same time.

“What’s it like when you can’t remember who you are?”

Doc paused before answering. No one had ever dared ask him this question before. “When you were a kid,
did you ever wake up in the middle of the night all alone and afraid of the dark?”

“Sure.”

“I mean really terrified for no reason at all. No nightmares, no monsters, no nothing: just the dark.”

“I guess. Sometimes.”

“Well, it’s like that. Only the darkness is inside, somehow. And I don’t know where the light switch is.”

“The light switch with your name on it.”

“Got it in one. When I know who I am, everything comes back to normal. But…”

“Yes?”

“But my memory’s not always there. You know what I mean? One minute I’ll be looking at something familiar, a knife, maybe, or a spoon, and the next I’ll be thinking, well this is really great but what is it called? What does it do? A
spoon,
mind you, and I can’t remember what it’s for.”

She stood in silence, weighing it up. Which was worse? Too much memory, or not enough?

“What’s your problem?” he asked, like her, going to the heart of the thing with childlike directness.

“What problem?”

“Start with Sam. What’s that all about?”

“He…I don’t know how to explain it. He knows something about me…” She could feel herself blushing in the dark, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.

“Go on,” he prompted gently. “You can tell Doc. I won’t hold it against you. Chances are I won’t even remember it when I wake up in the morning.”

She began to laugh, but then with a strange kind of emotional lurch she realized he meant it seriously. Literally. Her whole body began to shake. She held on to the low windscreen in front of her and took a deep, deep breath. “Okay. It started when I was just a kid in
high school. Ninth grade. There was this guy selling drugs…”

When Martyr brought his daughter up a cup of soup, he found her so deep in conversation with Weary that he just left it convenient to her elbow and went away again, feeling like an intruder. He joined Hood and heard, much as Robin had done five hundred miles south of here, the story of their meeting. At once he saw the dangers to the boat and to his daughter of a man whose memory did not work, but Sam put his mind at rest. “Funny thing, Mr. Martyr,” he said in that deep, gentle, strong bass of his, “I’ve never known him to switch off in action, you know? Unless he hits his head, like this afternoon, he’s always clear as a bell when there’s anything to do. But if he’s resting, say, or just sitting around, then it can sometimes slip away from him. I remember we were anchored off Silhouette just a couple of weeks ago…”

“
Sam
!” Doc’s voice interrupted the conversation.

“Yeah, Doc?”

“I think we’re coming up on the right spot. You want to start checking with the echo-sounder?”

They dropped anchor just after 23:30 and decided to go down at once. Richard had described the box he wanted in careful detail, especially after his bad luck with the original. As long as there were no unwelcome visitors down there to disturb them as he had been disturbed, they should get the thunderflashes up and stowed within half an hour. Then they could all get some rest and sail again at dawn.

Sam and Doc suited up. They would dive while Chris and her father pulled the boxes carefully aboard and checked them, leaving them on the afterdeck to drain. Robin’s wetsuit was too small to fit either man, so they split Richard’s. Doc got the leggings and Sam
the top. Both men had their own flippers for snorkeling, and the masks and tanks were standard size.

Vividly aware of Richard’s warnings about marine life in this area, they both took spear guns and powerful torches with flotation chambers, designed to rise quickly to the surface if they were dropped. Quietly, tensely, they went over the simple routine they had worked out, then it was time to go down into the warm, inky water. They rolled off the back of the lazarette, side by side. Christine put the bright waterproof guiding lights in the water, the beacons that were designed to vector them back to
Katapult.
For a moment Chris could see them, two bright yellow beams shading to green as they went deeper. Then there was only an occasional, secretive glimmer and the sound of the bubbles among the other restless sea sounds in the night.

Chris and C. J. Martyr sat at
Katapult
’s stern, legs dangling, close together and silent. So much had happened since they had boarded the Concorde at JFK that they felt a little like new people, like strangers starting a new relationship. Chris was at the heart of the change, changing herself, swiftly as a chameleon today alone. Her own head was spinning so much that she had no idea how the changes might seem to an observer, but she was aware of nothing special except that she had somehow come to terms with the look in Sam’s eyes. She was pleased she had handled
Katapult
well in a crisis. Had her father asked her, she might also have admitted that she proposed to wear bikinis more often in the future. And that she wanted Doc to come back, safe and sound and soon.

He exploded out of the water at their feet so unexpectedly that they both jumped. There had been no warning of his approach because he had switched off his torch while swimming toward the brightness of
Katapult
’s guiding lights. “They’re there,” he gasped. “Sam’s sorting out the ones we want. It’s a mess down there. I’d like to meet the criminal bastards who mixed that lot all up and then dropped it overboard. I know Richard only asked for one box, but we’d better bring a couple up in case there are more duds.” They threw him down the line to secure to the first of the chosen boxes and he caught it easily. Then, with a wave and a wash of water, he was gone.

This was not Doc’s idea of fun. As he switched on his flashlight and powered back along
Katapult
’s sleek hull toward the anchor chain, pulling the rope behind him, he turned over in his mind what it was he had become involved in. He liked the Mariners. He respected them, both individually and as a team. He wanted to help them and he wanted them to help him and Sam. But the thought of charging around a supertanker armed with Kalashnikovs and thunderflash grenades really had to give him pause. He thought he had left that sort of thing in Vietnam. And yet. And yet, the more he thought about it, the more he had to admit that it excited him. The prospect of action. Of going back to the edge one more time before settling down to build boats and make babies and grow fat and happy.

The first box was sitting waiting by the anchor as agreed. No sign of any others yet, or of Sam. He hung there, secured the rope to the handle at its side then pulled twice. The line tightened, the box stirred and began to slide across the sea bed. He turned to follow it up.

Sam Hood was swimming purposefully in the opposite direction, carrying another of the boxes close to his chest, trying to get out over the long drop where he could get rid of it safely. It was one of the broken ones, one of the ones Richard had warned them to be par-
ticularly careful with. But the warning had been in vain. There was something going on inside it Sam did not like at all. There was something hot in there. Something trailing a thickening stream of bubbles behind it. Although smashed, the box remained stubbornly impenetrable, its lid locked, its sides damaged with cracks too narrow to admit prying fingers. God knew what was in there. Some grenades for certain—he had just been able to make them out in the beam of his torch. But there was something else there as well. Long pipes, like candles: flares of some kind, maybe. And one of them had ignited, he had no idea how or why. It just had, a cloud of bubbles giving it away. As soon as it became clear the thing was not going to explode at once, he decided to take the calculated risk of moving it. This was a small box. Light. He reckoned his chances were okay. And anyway, if it went off close to all the other stuff it would probably set off a chain reaction that would blow them all out of the water.