The Fire Ship (21 page)

The excitement died the moment she saw Cecil Smyke. It was replaced with a sort of dull horror she had been at great pains to disguise from the others, indulging it only after her separation from them when she was alone. But she was not the sort of woman to give in to weakness and she soon began to use her rela-
tive liberty to put together a cache of the sort of equipment she would need if and when she tried to make her escape.

At last, the only thing keeping her here was the certainty that she had not been mistaken in her first hopes: Fatima was on
Prometheus
somewhere. But how could Fatima have been party to the murder of Cecil Smyke? And why hadn’t she made some sort of contact?

The fifth night of captivity was literally hellish. The air outside the bridge was so horrifically stultifying that even in the coolness of the air-conditioned rooms, something of that fierce Gulf heat intruded. Certainly the thunderous atmosphere in the dark air above caused fractiousness, short tempers, and colossal headaches in everyone aboard. Asha was prone to atmospheric migraines and fought this one by standing under a shower set exactly at blood heat for the better part of an hour. At about seven she emerged, cool enough to feel a slight chill from the air-conditioning, and consequently she caught up a towel to wrap around herself even though she knew she would regret it later when she became too hot to sleep. The action was providential because otherwise she would have been naked when she walked into her cabin and found the terrorist leader there.

She froze, thunderstruck by his presence here. Automatically she opened her mouth to scream. But the instant she did so, the window behind his shoulder was filled with an explosion of lightning like Armageddon and the immediate havoc of thunder was like Judgment Day. The deafening pyrotechnics of the storm gave them pause and some semblance of calm had returned to the situation before communication became possible. He made no move toward her as the thunder rolled on and on, so she walked past him to her wardrobe and put on a long silk dressing gown.

As she did so, a second claw of lightning pounced down toward the desert. This time the thunder was, if anything, louder. She kicked her bare feet into open sandals and, sweeping her hair back over one broad shoulder, she confronted him again.

“Is this a social call?” she demanded as the echoes rumbled into silence. And their eyes locked. Hers beneath imperious brows, tawny; his deep-shadowed under the folds of his kaffiyah, dark brown, almost black. Not quite sane.

Lightning crackled down outside and an odor of ozone permeated the unquiet air. Had he answered, it would have been lost in the avalanche of sound outside. Instead, he raised his scarred hands to his shirt collar and began to unbutton it. At once she drew herself up, eyes busy around her cabin, looking for a weapon. But when she looked back into his mad black gaze, something she saw there stopped her. And the thought that rapists usually start with their trousers, not their shirts. She looked down at what he was doing and understood. By the time he pulled the shirt off altogether, she was total professionalism, concentrating absolutely. Her mind focused so that even the cataclysm outside receded until nothing existed but her expertise and his poor, twisted body.

He seemed to have been crushed. That was the only explanation that sprang to mind. She could only see his torso, of course, but nothing else could explain what she was looking at. The left side of his body seemed to have been crushed beneath some unimaginable thing or force. Something so massive that it should have killed him. Would have been far more merciful if it had killed him. Crushed him until his broken bones had cut their way out through his flesh. Then they had simply been tucked back into him and allowed to heal that way. He
held himself erect. He seemed to move freely, normally. How he did so, she could not think: by the exercise of indomitable will. The twisted, tortured muscles stretching over the strange angular bones should not have worked at all. The bones themselves should not have held together. The joints, those many joints between ribs, breastbone, spine, shoulder, arm, hand, should not have worked. He should not have been able to breathe or move. This body should not contain life.

Looking at it in dumb wonder, she was reminded of a haunting story she had once read where the survivor of a space crash in some far distant galaxy had been saved by kindly alien surgeons who had sewn her back together—but they did so without ever having seen a human body before. The result must have been something like this, she supposed.

He did not flinch when her fingers probed gently down the twisted columns of his trapezius and latissimus dorsi, that long range of muscular hills astride the valley of his spine. The skin itself was not extensively scarred here, but from shoulder to knuckle on the left arm there was a network of scars the smallest end of which had served to distinguish this man from the other terrorists. He could have been crushed in a road accident, she supposed. Or trapped under a collapsing building.

“There is nothing I can do for you. You know that.”

“You can give me something for the pain.”

She watched in fascination as the muscles writhed into awkward but effective motion. He must have been tended by someone with no medical knowledge at all. “Oh, I can do that all right, but I don’t think anyone could make this better.”

“It was the hand of Allah, blessings be upon Him: it would be a sacrilege to make it better. But sometimes at
night I weaken, for He asks me to bear more than I can endure. And I need…I need…”

Thunder drowned out what he said, but she knew what he needed well enough. “You’d better come down to the surgery.”

On the way down, her mind worked rapidly, trying to turn the situation to her best advantage. The scope for action was large. Ultimately she could kill him if she wanted: he would have no idea what she was actually giving him, after all. But that was a course of action she could not contemplate for long, even under these circumstances. She could try something that might yield long-term rewards without causing immediate reprisals, however. She could try for information.

“You should keep a supply of pills with you,” she told him when they arrived. “But for now, I’ll give you an injection that will act more quickly. Only one injection. Then you’ll have to rely on the pills.” She paused, half hoping he would take the tablets and go. But he sat obediently on the examination table and rolled up his right sleeve.

Asha slid the long needle into his pale flesh and depressed the plunger. The porthole lit up dazzlingly and instant thunder roared. She held her breath and slid the needle out. John, Bob, and the rest were just next door. She felt their proximity acutely. God! How she wanted to help them. “Just stay sitting down,” she advised gently. “It will make you feel a little sleepy, I expect. I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. Lie down if you’d like to.”

He swung round at her suggestion and lay back. His hands went to the folds of his kaffiyah but then hesitated. He had no intention that she should see his face. “Switch off the light,” he croaked.

Sitting in the dark beside him she waited until the rhythm of his breathing told her he was asleep.

“How did it happen?” she asked quietly.

“…ship…” His voice was sleepy. Dreamy. The drug she had given him had killed his pain. Put him to sleep. Left him susceptible to suggestion, like sodiumpentathol. He would answer her questions quite freely for a while if she was careful what she asked.

“A ship…” she prompted.

“The bastard killed my father. He deserved everything he got. God, he was so easy to fool. Me. The owner. The Afrikaaners. Everybody fooled him. No oil. No problem. But she had to sink, you see. No evidence. No comebacks. Full insurance. Had to sink. Ask old Ben. Good old chap. Shift the ballast, tank to tank. Break her back.”

“Break whose back?”

“Easy? Christ, you’d think they’d know. Takes years of training to make sure we don’t break their backs every time.”

“Whose back?”

“Broke her back. Middle of a storm. Middle of the Channel. Perfect.”

“What did you do?” she demanded, with all the force she dared, leaning as close to him as she could without touching him.

Just at that moment, another bolt of lightning filled the room with intense light for a micron and established every detail of his face on her retinas. He was turned toward her, kaffiyah open, eyes wide but blind with sleep. The right side of his face, nearest the brightness, was perfectly illuminated. The left shaded mercifully into shadow. The right side showed an open, cheerful, almost boyish countenance with high cheekbones, deep laugh lines, broad, square chin. The left side, beyond the crushed nose, twisted away into a ruin to match the ruin of the left side of his body.

“Oh, God!” she said, startled.

“Oh, God,” he echoed at once, speaking incredibly quickly, “she’s breaking up. Must get away. I’ll never get off alive if I don’t…No don’t…Don’t get in the way! Leave me alone! I’ll kill…
Kill
…
KILL
…” He slammed upright. She saw him outlined against the porthole, arms reaching out as though holding something. As though pointing at something. “Goodbyeeeeeeeee…” he sang. Like the old song. Triumphant. Insane.

He slammed back onto the table, rigid. “Nooooo…” A little boy’s voice, sad and disappointed.

“Noooo…” squeezed out of him. He hadn’t even breathed in.

“NOOOO…” Crushed out of him with the last of his air. The last of his life—or should have been. He was spread out against the table, shaking, in the grip of the ghost of whatever force had done this to him. During the breakup of whatever ship.

He was gone. Far beyond Asha’s ability to recall him. She slowly got to her feet and crossed to the door to escape his cries of pain. She was disappointed to have missed the opportunity, for on the face of it she had learned nothing of any use. Except the depth of the madness gripping the man in whose power they lay.

She had to contact Fatima and get them both out of this situation at the earliest possible instant. But for the moment she had better go into hiding herself—if this man remembered anything of this when he woke up tomorrow then Asha was as good as dead. This was, after all, the man who had butchered Cecil Smyke without a second thought.

On the sixth day, things in the gym changed. Early morning saw the arrival of the books from the ship’s
library. Then the televisions and videos were wheeled in. Restrictions on talking were relaxed. “I don’t like this,” were John’s first words to Bob Stark.

“Neither do I,” said the big American. “Looks like this is shaping up to be a long stay after all.”

The pressure was on them now to regulate the crew’s amusements carefully. They did not want the team they had built up so painstakingly in adversity to fall apart now. They still had work to do. It remained obvious that the only way forward lay outside. But how to get out there? Able to talk now, they started to plan in detail.

Only to find that on the seventh day things had changed again. The leader came in at dawn, backed by a phalanx of five heavily armed men.

“Where is she?” he screamed, his scarred hand tight around the stock of his rifle.
Prometheus
’s crew, just coming awake, looked at him in dazed confusion. Only John and Bob had the wits about them to realize what he was talking about.

“Where is she?” he screamed again.

Silence.

“Very well then. Up and out. All of you. Line up at this end. We are going to search the ship.
You
are going to search the ship, under the direction of my guards.”

The search revealed nothing, but such was the leader’s rage that he made one major miscalculation. He allowed John, Bob, Kerem, and Twelve Toes to form a group together. As they pretended to search for Asha, they put together their final escape plans. Clearly whatever the terrorists were waiting for was not likely to happen soon. On the other hand, the fact that
Prometheus
’s complement had been here this long with no sign of help from the outside probably meant that no help was coming soon either.

There were ways of getting out, however: Asha had proved that. And there were places aboard to hide in. The terrorists seemed to know the layout of tankers very well indeed, but the fact remained that no two tankers are identical, and
Prometheus
had nooks and crannies only her crew knew about. But escaping from the gymnasium and hiding aboard would not be good enough. It would only be the first step. The prime objective would be to get clear away. To cross the Gulf, if a big lifeboat could be stolen, or to contact local shipping if the people who escaped had to take a liferaft or swim for it. And there did seem to be a lot of local shipping. From the main deck, they could see a fishing fleet out in the Gulf, and one neat little thirty-footer cruising inquisitively close at hand. It was even near enough for them to read its name:
Alouette.

But then the terrorists’ patience ran out. They were all herded back into the gym where they were made to stand, guards clustered threateningly around them, and listen to another speech. The speech went on for twenty minutes and was completed by an enraged gesture from the speaker. Immediately the guards opened fire, spraying the ceiling with bullets. Glass from the shattered light fittings, dust, and splinters came raining down. It was a mercy, thought John, that the gym had been added as an afterthought, that it wasn’t iron plate up there, as it was in the rest of the bridge-house, or the room would have been full of lethal ricochets.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” snarled the leader in the echoing silence after the shooting had stopped. “This is not a game. If you forget that, then you are all dead men. Now clear this mess up and get the books and televisions out of here. No more talking!”

So the silent boredom was resumed. But this time
the number of people willing to join in the games was sharply reduced. Many were genuinely frightened by the terrorists’ display. Waverers were further disturbed as the heat of the day began to move into the crowded room and they realized the leader had made good another of his earlier threats and switched the air-conditioning off. But those threats made the escape committee even more determined to get someone out as soon as possible. How to do this remained problematic, for they were watched ever more closely by the grim guards. There was only one wild card: Asha. John and Bob moved their beds nearest to the doors out onto the afterdeck. If she was going to make contact she would do it here during the night.