The Fire Ship (18 page)

“Okay. But if we fly east in a small jet for speed we want to be able to pick up a helicopter somewhere along the line to get us aboard
Katapult.
”

“Like that Navy chopper from the
Mississippi,
” said Robin.

“Can you do that, Angus?”

“Get the air-sea rescue boys? Yes, in an emergency.”

“So we’re definitely up at nine. Down and in the helicopter by twelve. Looking for them somewhere by one. That’s near as damn it twelve hours’ time. Where can they be in twelve hours?”

“Shall I ask?”

“No. Martyr hasn’t got the chart, has he? Not by the radio. And from the sound of things, Chris’s got her hands full. Jesus, what a mess.”

“They could get here in eighteen hours. Maybe less,” observed Robin, pulling him back onto line. Her long finger, with its short-cut, boyish fingernail, rested squarely on Fate. As it did so, a single, huge teardrop splashed down onto the sea beside it. “It’s a good rendezvous anyway,” she persisted. “Bloody great oil rig in the middle of the sea lanes. Hard to miss even in the afternoon, from
Katapult
or from the air. That’s where I’d meet them. Unless,” she offered, “you want them to go into harbor somewhere.”

“And give the whole thing up?” He tested the suggestion. Examining her true meaning. Had they gone too far? Should they call a halt now? Hand everything over to the authorities after all? All they had to do was tell
Katapult
to head for the nearest port and it was all over.

“No…you can’t.” Oddly, it was Angus who spoke. “You can’t do that. We’re too close. You can’t chuck it in now. Robin’s right. Get on to Salah. Tell him what’s
happened. Then you can all go at dawn and meet them at Fate sometime tomorrow.”

“Right.” Richard slapped his hand down onto the Gulf chart. “That’s it, then. We contact Salah, then get a jet first thing in the morning to take us down to Sharja. Air-sea rescue helicopter out to Fate. We’ll meet them there in eighteen hours’ time. Just before sunset tomorrow.”

“Martyr,” said Angus at once into the microphone, completely unaware of any double meaning, “it’s Fate…”

Chris ground the whole length of her body down against Weary’s tossing form, arms and legs spraddled, trying to control him. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. She felt like screaming at him but she knew that would do more harm than good. She imagined strength into her spread limbs, therefore. Believed weight and substance into her long frame, and pinned him to the bunk by the simple force of her will. And as she did so, she feverishly searched her memory for the magic litany of phrases Sam Hood had used to bring him out of this.

Sam Hood. The thought of him brought tears to her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away. She had only known the man for a day and had spent much of that time hating him for what he knew about her. So why was she crying for him? Above and behind her, she heard her father speaking urgently into the radio but had neither the leisure nor the inclination to listen to what he was saying.

“It’s all right. Don’t be frightened. I’m here. It’s okay. Try to remember. You’re Doc. Doc Weary. Born Halloween, in Perth, Australia.” No, that simply wasn’t right. And a name. Hood had called him a full name. What was it?

She couldn’t bear to look into those hurt, terrified little boy’s eyes of his. Instead, she buried her face into
the hot angle between his shoulder and his neck, whispering like a lover while her mind raced.

“You’re Doc Weary. Born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight…” That was better, she thought. It was coming. “William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight.”

But still he twisted and bucked beneath her. She rose against him, forcing him down with her hips, arching her back and breathing deeply. And so it was she noticed that his hair had fallen back, revealing the great scarred dome of his forehead. The sweatband! It came to her in a flash. The sweatband was his security blanket. Like her old plaid shirt and tatty jeans. He would never come back without it! It was in the bundle of gear under the bunk. She reached down for it.

At once his freed hand was round her neck, forcing her down until mere inches separated their eyes. “Who am I?” he screamed.

And, in the midst of the crisis it came to her. The answer. “Albert Stephen William Weary. Born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight. Don’t be frightened, I’m here with you. You’re Doc and you’re going to be fine.” Her hand scrabbled among the rubber, fingers searching for that discarded strip of elastic toweling. Terrified instincts telling her to scream, struggle, tear free of his overwhelming power, and run. Cool, calm mind delivering the words gently to her softly whispering lips. And something started stirring in the lost depths of his eyes.

Pain.

Of course, it would be. He had run away into his nothingness because of the pain of Sam’s death, and here she was calling him back to face it. To suffer it. But she had no choice. Things needed to be done that only he could do. And he couldn’t stay away forever.

Her fingers found the sweatband and she let go of his other arm, rearing up again against his weakening grip, thrusting both elbows into the mattress just above his shoulders. Still speaking soothingly, the calm tone never faltering, even as that second arm whipped around her waist, crushing her down again, she stretched the headband carefully and slid it gently over his head with shaking hands.

And suddenly the pressure on her was lessened. Suddenly his lips were moving in a silent echo of hers. “Albert Stephen William Weary…”

Until his eyes came to life again.

For a time they lay as they had been, bizarrely like lovers, crushed against each other on the bunk. From who knows what hidden recesses deep within her, a terrible warmth washed over Christine Martyr then. Affection that she had kept dammed within her for nearly fifteen years burst its barriers at last and flooded out of her long green eyes in tears. So, as the pressure of his arms about her neck and waist slackened away at last and his strong, broad body lay absolutely still beneath her, she pressed her lips down on his lips and she kissed with all her might. She did not know if he responded. For now she did not care.

After unnumbered, delirious moments, she broke away, gasping for breath. She looked down into the blue eyes that were watching her quizzically. Into a face as soaked in tears as her own. And when she spoke, her voice was broken, husky, as though she had been screaming for hours. “Welcome back, Doc,” she said.

And he said, “Welcome back, Chris,” as though he knew how long she, too, had been away. Now it was her turn to look quizzical, and his turn to reach up and move gentle fingers across her forehead into the long
spun gold of her hair. Then her father came down the companionway and so she rolled off him and sat up.

Martyr hesitated in the doorway as they looked up at him. He was slightly confused for a moment, almost disoriented. Something seemed to have changed during the last few minutes. Something beyond Sam’s death. Something almost as crucial. He felt certain of it but he could see no evidence of it. Only Weary, back to normal, sitting beside Christine on the bunk.

“They’ll meet us at the old Fate platform in about eighteen hours,” he said. “We’ll have to get moving if we’re going to be there.”

They had two important duties to perform before they could up anchor. They had to stow the box of thunderflashes and they had to find some way of saying good-bye to Sam. Sam had been a preacher’s boy. He kept a Bible and a service book with him at all times. So, after they had put the box of grenades beside the Kalashnikhovs in the lazarette, they read a prayer over Sam. It was as simple as that. Unreal. Pack away the thunderflashes, read a prayer over Sam.

They pulled up the anchor and got under way at 01:30 local time.

The south wind that had been coming and going over the last few weeks was a phenomenon related exclusively to the fierce heat of the day. At night the prevailing wind returned, blowing stiffly from the north. For the next nine hours, they cut across this at speed until it began to falter in the midmorning. But by that time they were well north of Sirik. When the wind died, they tacked easily in the dead air and waited for the southerly to spring up as it had done at this time every day. And it didn’t let them down. While Martyr was checking on the radio with Angus at base, Chris
and Doc set the sails and waited for the first furnace gust. It came within minutes and built to that steady rush of air they had grown used to.
Katapult
leaned steadily away from it and sped southwest across it, her automatic knot meter clicking up from fifteen knots through twenty to twenty-five. It was exhilarating sailing, and, but for the dark cloud cast by Sam’s death, they would have been ecstatic. Even so, Weary called across the keen song of the wind, “You wait till we put the spinnaker up. Then you’ll see something!” They hit a long comber and white spray exploded back across the cockpit, soaking them.

She stripped her shirt off and let the spray hit her flesh, completely at ease in the bikini now. And yet the fact of this caused a twinge of memory and guilt. She looked across at Doc and he was frowning. Of course he was, she thought. She was herself, now. Well, let him mourn. There would be time enough to make him smile. Then, having nothing else to do, she leaped up to her favorite perch, on the weather side, by the shroud. “Put on a safety line,” he called at once. “We’d never be able to stop in time if you went over.” She was happy to do so. Especially as she realized that, for all his sad preoccupation, he had been watching her all along.

As they sailed back in through Hormuz without even deviating from the rhumb line that would take them down to Fate, Martyr reported in again that they were running tight to time.

They sighted the old platform at 16:15 local time and were beside it in ten minutes. They were all exhausted after the long, exhilarating run and, as Doc hit the buttons controlling the automatic sail-furling equipment, they looked around themselves, as if surprised to be here.
Katapult
began to pitch in the chop as the way came off her, that damaged mast moving in jerky arcs
across the hard blue sky. A sense of anticlimax gripped the three of them as they stood gazing about at the empty sea.

But then Chris’s sharp ears heard, above the slapping of the water on the hull, the whine of the wind in the minimal rigging and the distant surf-rumble of the waves against Fate’s great hollow legs, the rhythmic throbbing of a helicopter engine. At once she was searching the sky with shaded eyes. And there it was, high in the air almost due south, riding the wind toward them. It was overhead within minutes and the first figure was being lowered onto the afterdeck. It was Richard, and after he had landed, he paused there to guide down first Robin, then Salah. Then the Mariners ran forward while Salah oversaw the lowering of their luggage, boxes, and bags.

The six of them assembled briefly in the cockpit while the helicopter thundered away. But they split into teams almost at once. Salah, uninvolved with the planning of the course, took the con—more as lookout than steersman because they weren’t going anywhere yet. Martyr, in charge of the radio in Sam’s place, reported safe arrival to Angus in Manama. The other four went below.

No sooner were they in the cabin than Richard had the chart on the table. “The current weather pattern is set to hold for the forseeable future,” he began. “So it seems we can rely on southerlies during the day building up to gale force in the late afternoon, and northerlies at night. We really want to head west and we can get across either wind fairly efficiently.” He glanced down at his watch. “If you agree to my rough sailing plan, Doc, then we can be away at seventeen hundred hours on the dot. Now here’s what I propose.” They all leaned forward as he gestured over the sand, purple,
aquamarine, and white of Admiralty chart number 2858 spread out flat before them.

“Here we are at Fate. Here’s where we want to be, at Bushehr. There is no direct course we can sail because the Iranian coast comes out so far down here, but it is three hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. Clearly we have to dogleg round the coast of Iran, so we have to go west and then almost due north. But if we simply do that, then we lose a great deal of advantage from the wind and
Katapult
’s speed.

“So what I propose is this. First, we set a course southwest down to Zarakkuh here. That’s one hundred and eighty miles. We’ll have this southerly to run across for another hour or so, but then we should have that northerly at our shoulder until we’re there. By my calculations that should be at oh two hundred hours tomorrow morning.

“At Zarakkuh we tack into a northwesterly course, which gives us a second leg of three hundred and thirty miles to a point out here about twenty miles southwest of
Prometheus.
From the moment we tack until dawn we’ll be going across this northerly sailing upwind, but from dawn onward we’ll have the downwind reach, and we can really get up some speed. I’ve allowed twelve hours for that and so we should be in position for our final tack at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.

“About twenty miles from
Prometheus,
we make that final tack. It won’t be much of one—just enough to bring us in at full speed. We’ll have that southerly, at near storm force, steadily under our tails and, knowing
Katapult,
we can get across those last few miles in no time at all. They won’t be expecting us. Even when they see us they won’t suspect anything. What will we be, after all? A pleasure boat only just in control, running down the wind far too fast. We’ll go alongside her
at full speed, showing off, and get tangled in her anchor chain. While Chris and Robin make a meal out of freeing her, the rest of us go up the way Salah and I went up last time. Then we move down the deck under cover of the pipes.”

He looked around at their faces, trying to read the thoughts behind them. Martyr’s lean figure suddenly cut out the light from the companionway. “All clear with Angus,” he said.

“Right,” said Richard. “Seventeen hundred hours local. By this time tomorrow
Prometheus
will be free. Let’s do it.”

Salah stood almost at the top of the mast, looking out into the gusty afternoon. He had climbed up the footholds at the front and then turned so that the raked upright leaned back behind him and the shrouds stretched out from their junction just above his head, convenient to his hands. The boat’s motion had moderated as her head swung into the wind, and now he found himself staring up and out at Fate. The huge platform towered above him, all rusty sands and russets and reds. A spider’s web of girders stretched between its four great limbs and there the wind sang even more loudly than the surf thundered against the hollow iron members. With the power of the sinking sun throwing brightness and shadow starkly across it, the disused platform looked solid, businesslike, threatening.

And it felt to Salah, looking up, that there was someone hidden up there, looking down at him.

Then the others came cascading up into the cockpit. “Seventeen hundred hours,” sang out Martyr, the log keeper. “Under way at seventeen hundred hours.”