The Fire Ship (4 page)

The malfunction of the automatic tank washing unit had shown up on Smyke’s computers during routine checking yesterday. Now it was important to get the unit fixed and clean the tank before loading a new cargo—hence the visit by more than a normal survey team: the first name on John’s crayon-written list was that of the irreplaceable American chief engineer, Bob Stark.

God! He hoped Bob was all right. They had sailed together regularly during the last five years, and their
current lazy, friendly rivalry for the attentions of Asha Quartermaine hid a deep affection.

His feet skidded, thick rubber soles suddenly failing to find traction. He looked down, surprised to find himself standing on the tank floor, virtually up to his ankles in black ooze. “Captain here. On tank floor. Beware thick oil scum.”

He glanced at his watch again and Asha was at his side. Four minutes clicked up. Kerem joined them. That was it. One man remained on platform 3 looking for lights. Bob’s team should have been signaling since they radioed for help, to guide the crash team in. Ominously there had been no lights: that darkness over by the suspect unit made John fear for his chief engineer’s life.

He turned toward the first of the seven steel walls between them and their goal, only to bite back a shout of fright. Straightening into the beam of his torch came the figure of the man he feared dead. And, behind him, the rest of the team. Alive, unconcerned, all of them breathing the air.

John tore his headset off, gulping in the oil-tainted, nonlethal atmosphere. “Bob!” he stepped forward, hand thrust out, almost overcome with relief. Stark’s open, cheerful countenance folded into a look of concern as he took in Asha’s presence. He swept one hand back through the tousled gold shock of his hair, letting the farmboy cowlick fall to his narrow blue eyes in an unconscious gesture.

“What’s this?” he demanded. “Some kind of exercise?”

“Didn’t you broadcast an emergency?”

“Us? Nope. Clear and clean. Fixed the unit. No problem.”

“Then what…”

“Captain!” Distant voice from the headset in the helmet in his hand. “Deck here. Capt…”

They set off at a run, everything else forgotten but the urgent need to answer that panic call from above.

John didn’t even think to switch off his stopwatch. It had just clocked up eight minutes when he stepped up out of the tank top to stagger a little, stunned by the humid heat and brightness, across his silent deck. He sensed rather than saw Asha, Bob, and the others come up behind him, for all his attention was focused on what was going on in front of him.

Every officer, cadet, and crewman in his complement stood assembled here in shocked, silent lines, hands on heads, under the guns of a dozen figures dressed in camouflage fatigues and bright checked kaffiyah headdresses that hid their faces like masks.

Such are the vagaries of shock that John was overwhelmed at first, not by this act of terrorist piracy, but by the stunning cleanness of the air. And yet there was a familiar scent there too, terrifyingly out of place. He felt suddenly cold and stepped forward after the merest instant of hesitation. At once one of the guns was leveled at him and he saw a tiny trickle of smoke oozing from the muzzle. And he recognized the smell as cordite.

Then even as this jumble of sensation fell into place in his mind he noticed something else. There, at the terrorist’s feet was Cecil Smyke, sitting, apparently at his ease, against a vertical deck pipe. But even as John recognized that languid, silk-clad body, it rolled onto its side like a stuffed toy and slumped over until its sickstained chest was hidden from view. Only then could everyone see the gaping bullet wound where the back of his head used to be.

England.

Six hours later, three thousand miles west, a black Bentley Turbo Mulsane came off the M6 just south of Penrith, in the north of England, crossed the river and the railway, and began to climb Edenside toward Croglin and Cold Fell. It rode up the slate-dark Cumberland country like a thunderbolt heading for the opening of
Macbeth.
A gray summer’s day was drawing to its haunted, misty close and the precipitous, heathermottled hills were beginning to resemble slag heaps from the Black Country farther south.

Bill Heritage loved this landscape—Wordsworth country—more than any other, and, as chairman of the largest privately owned shipping company in Europe, he had traveled the world and knew them all. And he loved Cold Fell, the great, frowning fourteenth-century border reivers’ castle-cum-home that had come to him as a dowery with his wife nearly fifty years before when he had been young, ambitious, and poor, and she—Lady Fiona Graham—had been the most sought-after debutante of the last social season before the War. Their marriage had lasted thirty happy years before her abrupt and mercifully brief, fatal illness. It had been perfected in the birth of two beautiful daughters, both married in
turn to Bill’s senior captain and business partner, Richard Mariner.

The elder, Rowena, had been killed on the eve of her divorce from Richard. She had driven a wedge between Mariner and Heritage that only the younger daughter, Robin, had been able to remove. But at a price. During the years when Richard had worked away from the sea—and in bitter separation from Heritage Shipping—Bill had come to rely on Robin as his strong right hand. And now, the reliance he placed on her, the closely personal nature of the relationship between father and daughter had been fundamentally changed by her marriage. Bill and Richard were far too similar, though a generation apart, and the products of vastly different backgrounds and experiences, but essentially they were of a kind. In that strange way that men have, each had seen Robin as belonging to
him,
and not even that extraordinary woman could share herself between them.

Now, with Robin on the far side of the world, Bill had found himself a new right hand. Her name was Helen Dufour and she sat in the deep seat at his side now as he throttled the Bentley up the sheer mountain road toward Cold Fell where they would spend the coming weekend as secret lovers.

At the exact moment that Bill turned on the headlamps, sending great white beams into the gathering dark in front of them, the car phone started ringing.

Helen’s gray eyes flicked across to him as her long right hand rested questioningly on the handset. This weekend was strictly off the record, exploiting the August bank holiday to get away from the city so that she could come to know Cold Fell before she became its mistress. As far as anyone knew, she was at her family home in Grimaud, beneath the shadow of its castle
overlooking the Gulf of St. Tropez; both Bill and Helen were too worried about gossip columnists to risk anything more public yet.

Bill shook his head and gestured—they were approaching a parking area. He swung onto the graveled surface and parked, already too deep in thought to be aware that the headlight beams reached out above a sheer drop as though trying to bridge the valley with light. Night was filling the steep-sided chasm with misty shade. Far below, the river thundered in summer flood; far above, a ragged rent in the cloud cover gave a first glimpse of the crescent moon.

Part of Helen’s mind took all this in as Bill reached for the phone, pushing her hand off it. “Yes?” His voice was strong, even at his age; virile.

The handset gabbled.

Helen lay back, stretching, every sense tensely alert beneath apparent sleepiness. She herself had left “emergencies only” notes for both of them with the weekend secretariat; this had to be a major problem. But it soon proved to be much worse than anything that sprang to her pragmatic Provençal mind and the beginning of her part in the nightmare most of them would be lucky to walk away from.

“Piracy!” The quaintly archaic word was the first he could manage to say after hanging up. He turned to her, face expressing both rage and disbelief. “They’ve seized
Prometheus
with her whole crew. John Higgins, Bob Stark, Asha Quartermaine…”

“Why?” She had no French intonation. She spoke English as though she had spent all her life at Oxford, her accent a direct reflection of her mental acuity and academic education.

“God knows! Arab terrorists, apparently. Nobody knows any more than that, except…”

She waited, knowing better than to prompt him.

“…except they say they’ve executed a senior officer to prove how serious they are.”

“Dieu!”

“We have to contact Robin and Richard at once!”

“Impossible, unless they have radioed in to the office. No one knows where they are.”

“We’ve got to go back to London. Now!”

Even as he spoke, he was swinging the Mulsane out onto the empty road.

They were back in Heritage House on Leadenhall Street in London before midnight. A sleepy doorman checked them through security and they rode up in the lift together. The top floor was electric with tension, the twenty-four-hour secretariat supplemented by those executives Helen had managed to contact on the car phone while Sir William was exceeding the speed limit by a factor of almost two, racing down the empty M6 to London. Into this tense atmosphere they stepped, deep in conversation, and unconsciously undid all the careful secrecy that had obscured their true relationship until now. Security had buzzed up. Everybody was waiting for them, many agog to know how two people apparently spending the weekend at different ends of the continent could manage to turn up simultaneously. But such speculations were almost forgotten as everyone bustled into the quickly overcrowded chief executive’s suite of offices. It was the natural place to go, under the circumstances. Such was the nature of Heritage Mariner’s senior management that there were three suites of offices here: Bill Heritage’s, the Mariners’, and Helen Dufour’s. Officially “retired” for some years now, Sir William’s position as chairman of the board gave him a small suite that he used only occasionally.
Robin and Richard, as joint managing directors, shared a large, fully equipped complex, which consisted of their own offices, two secretaries’ offices, a bedroom, and a bathroom. But all that was closed off now. So it was natural that everybody gather in Helen’s office because she was the senior executive present, chief executive until Robin and Richard returned, the one with her fingers currently on the pulse of the business.

Her desk was not made of teak or mahogany like the others’, but of molded plastic: more like the console in a spacecraft than anything else. The central writing area was surrounded by dials and video display screens controlled from a keyboard designed to slide in and out like a central drawer. Phones, each one with its own molded perch, nested round the upper edge; all programmed to contact over one hundred numbers worldwide, just in case Helen’s computers could not get enough online information directly from the computers of her contacts. Her fingers were busy the moment she sat in her chair; simultaneously she began interrogating all the staff members who had been there since the first bulletin. As she talked she tapped in urgent requests for information and was answered at once through her electronic mail system. The screens filled with messages. The printers in her secertary’s office chattered discreetly into life.

But no new information of any use was currently available. As the small hours ticked slowly by, it became clear that there was no machine-generated or -stored information for any of them. Bill Heritage, content to take a back seat and reexamine those files Helen had finished with at greater depth, began to get restless. He understood the high-tech information-gathering systems Helen used almost as well as she, but he also knew they had their limitations. Reaching the limits of his patience, he scowled at his watch and crossed to his
own, unimpressive office. The new computer networks were stymied for the moment: it was time to try the old-boy network.

They were at school together, went up to Cambridge together, joined up together in 1939. After demobilization, the thirty-year-old Captain Bill Heritage had gone into shipping. Commander Justin Bulwer-Lyons had joined the Diplomatic Corps. He had been Bill’s best man—and might be again, sooner than he knew—and was Robin’s godfather. Neither man was in his wonted position of absolute power any longer, but each kept his finger on the pulse. Bill and Bull had been famous for their all-night activities in their youth and neither of them slept much now, either. Bull answered the phone on the third ring.

“Bull? Bill Heritage here.”

“Been expecting your call, old man. What can I say? It’s a nasty business. One dead so far, I understand.”

“Yes, that’s what we hear. Any word at the Bureau as to who it is…was…”

“Nothing.” Bull was one of the chief advisers to the International Maritime Bureau, the Interpol of the sea. There was little that escaped him if it happened in shipping. And his specific area of expertise was the Middle East—so if anyone outside Heritage Mariner might have helpful information, it would be he.

“Anything on the general situation coming through the Office?” Bill meant the Foreign Office.

“Nothing. The Corps is quiet, too.” The Diplomatic Corps.

“Intelligence?” It was a faint hope.

“If they know anything, it hasn’t filtered down to us yet.”

There was an uncomfortable, almost threatening silence for several long seconds.

Then, “Any projections, Bull?”

Bull was prepared for the question: “Right. The situation as I understand it is this. Your tanker
Prometheus
has a complement of about forty. English and American officers; Hong Kong Chinese stewards; mixed bag of general purpose seamen—everything from Palestinian to Pakistani. Mixed bag of hostages; lots of governments over lots of barrels.”

“Right. Most of the G.P. seamen are Muslims, though.”

“The same religion as the terrorists, you mean? Unlikely to be much help. I assume most of your people are conservative, ordinary Sunni Muslims. The terrorists are likely to be Shi’ite fundamentalists. Very different kettle of fish: like looking at Ireland and saying Protestants and Catholics are both Christians.”

“I see what you mean…”

“Right. Anything else about the crew? Any specific diplomatic levers so to speak? Oh yes, Bob Stark, your American chief engineer.”

“His father is John Stark, senator from…”

“I know. But I was thinking of his uncle, Walter. Officer commanding the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet, currently on maneuvers in the Gulf of Oman.”

“That make much difference?”

“Not in the short term, but you never know. They’re forbidden in the Gulf at the moment, for diplomatic reasons though. Can’t go past Hormuz except in the most exceptional circumstances unless the President gives them the direct order. And anyway…”

“Yes?”

“As I understand it, your ship is still off Kharg Island. This puts her firmly in Iranian waters. There have been no pronouncements from Tehran so far, but I would assume both our chaps and the Americans will play it
safe until someone fairly senior over there makes the position pretty clear.”

“And that means?” There was a frosty tone in Bill’s voice: he could see where this was leading.

“If Khadaffi had them, then you might stand a chance. But I really can’t see anyone getting too gung ho with the Iranians, especially at the moment; I understand there’s the usual power struggle going on between various branches of the Irani armed forces. But even if there weren’t, one has only to think of President Carter…”

That uncomfortable silence fell on the lines again.

“But you think it’s random, Bull?”

“Don’t quite follow…”

“Were they after
any
ship or were they after
our
ship?”

“Have you had any demands? Any contact?”

“Nothing.”

“Probably is random in that case. I mean, it’s possible you have enemies that powerful, I suppose, but I’d say that unless you hear anything specific, assume you’re the victim of a sort of diplomatic traffic accident.”

The background noise on the phone lines whispered; Bill remembered reading somewhere that people had contacted the dead down unused phone lines.

Then Bull tried to lighten things a little, “But what does my goddaughter say? I can’t imagine either Robin or Richard short of ideas. I was just saying a couple of days ago, when the Bureau next goes shopping for advisers…”

“They’re out of touch, Bull. Gone off the face of the earth.”

“Not like you to be so fatalistic, Bill. Getting a bit tired?”

“Maybe just a tad. They left for the Seychelles last
week. Silhouette Island. Went sailing on some kind of yacht three days ago, that’s all anyone knows.”

“Well that’s all right then.”

“I don’t follow you, old man.”

“If they’re at sea, they’re bound to be fine. Directly descended from Neptune and Amphitrite, those two, the oceans love them.”

Unconsciously Bill touched the wood of his desk. Bull had always believed in pushing his luck to the limit; Bill was more careful. “Even so,” he countered, “they’re not much help at the moment.”

“I take your point. Look, if they were there, I suspect at least one of them would get the first flight out to the Gulf they could. It’s the obvious thing to do. It’s what I would do. Leave someone in charge of the office and see what things are like on the ground. Got anyone there you can trust?”

“Helen’s here.”

“God! That’s lucky. I thought she was in Grimaud this weekend. There you are then. Get out to the Gulf yourself. You’ll feel better in the thick of it anyway, if I know you. Now I know you’ve got your own offices out there, but the High Commissioner in Bahrain’s the son of a very dear friend…”

Sir William was back in Helen’s office a few minutes later. “Yes,” she agreed. “It’s the obvious thing to do; and you’re the obvious one to send. If anyone’s going out, it has to be someone with seniority to make decisions, someone with enough contacts to be sure of what’s going on, someone with weight…” She trailed off, exhausted. She hated being right. She hated knowing that he had to go. Talking herself into letting him.