The Fire Ship (7 page)

Richard was up at once. He had had enough. The message was gone but the radio was still here. He grabbed it. Five steps down to the lifeboat’s head. Massive twist of his body to swing the bulky radio onto
Katapult,
followed immediately by his own chest and legs. Even as he scrambled aboard the rope snapped; the instant his feet kicked free, the lifeboat turned and began to pull away.

He fell into the cockpit clutching the radio just as the other three arrived. “Jesus Christ!” yelled Hood, staring at the fast-approaching waterspout. “Where did that come from?” Then Weary grabbed him, pointing to the lifeboat scudding broadside-on to the wind away from them. The fierceness of the storm swept over it at once and turned it turtle. Then no one was watching it any longer: they all had too much else to do.

The black storm cloud that had spawned the waterspout covered half of the sky; the sun was somewhere behind it. Out of the sinister overcast came a huge white funnel. It fell vertically at first but after a hundred feet or so it twisted off line and writhed increasingly wildly
out of shape until it planted its foot firmly on the sea in the midst of a thick column of gyrating mist, dangerously close, dead ahead. The eternal mist was being sucked in, spewed up, and replaced at once in an incredible process by the wind. Such was the power of the thing that the sea dead ahead sloped up quite steeply. The spout sat on its own great hill of water, which appeared and disappeared as the first stinging downpour swept across their line of sight.

Richard had been in storms before but he had never experienced anything like this. The wind was solid around him as he finished stowing the lifeboat’s radio. He faced the storm briefly—and it nearly drowned him. He turned his back, choking, and was lucky enough to catch a breath before the air in front of him was sucked away. There was no gusting to it, no variation except for its gradual intensification. And it had all the power of a fire hose. And as the air was sucked in toward the spout, so everything seemed to stream along with it. The sea was steep-sided, dark, and vicious. Spray from the wave tops spewed back in solid chunks of water and the rain was abruptly torrential. Richard staggered forward and clung on. The wind pressed wet clothing to chilled skin so forcefully that the pattern of the material marked it. He suddenly realized there were bruises on his chest caused by his buttons.

Weary, his mind now clear, took charge. Obviously,
Katapult
’s engine was not going to be powerful enough to help much. No. If they were going to get out of this then Weary would have to
sail
them out of it. Hood had no problem with this. Richard was a man of action and would have preferred to be in charge; but he was also a fairweather yachtsman and knew a master when he saw one.

Robin, however, had serious reservations. Less than
five minutes had elapsed since the man now wrestling with the helm, the man in whose enormous hands their lives now rested, had been mindless, screaming, apparently insane. Hood knew this, and when she came toward him, he fell in beside her and as they worked, he talked. It was hardly an idle chat. Some of it was formless, almost meaningless, a series of disjointed phrases and half-sentences projected just a little louder than the screaming wind. Sam Hood was no fool. He knew Robin needed an explanation before she would trust Weary and obey him again—and he was acutely aware that any hesitation by anyone might easily prove lethal.

So, as Weary punched in the manual override and the systems belowdecks prepared to answer his dictates on heading, sail angle, outrigger angle, and all the rest, the others began to batten down everything, and to check every single line, strut, and joint that might fail fatally in the near future. Silently the telescopic booms moved out and the tall sails filled to bursting with the wind.

Richard started at the far stern. Hood and Robin started at the bow. All of them worked back toward the relative safety of the cockpit as fast as they could, for Weary wasted no time. Within thirty seconds of his arrival on deck.
Katapult
heeled to starboard, took the hurricane blast under her solid, experimental skirts—and was off on a wild roller-coaster ride toward the very heart of the thing.

“You know anything ‘bout Nam?” yelled Hood as they worked shoulder to shoulder.

“Bit.”

“Tet Offensive? Khe Sanh?”

“Some.”

“I met that asshole there. That was, what? February ’sixty-eight?
Long
ago…” The wind snatched at him,
he staggered, and some of his words were lost. “He was in a Huey of all things when I first saw him. I was in the jungle in back of Khe Sanh, pinned down, rest of the unit gone. We was part of D Company, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry, Twelfth Brigade of the American Division. Mean mothers; born to kill.”

The bow disappeared under a steep white horse. The foam hesitated, not knowing whether to splash back over them or to break forward with the brunt of the wind.

“Never found out precisely what unit Doc was with. Some gung ho elite volunteer Australian outfit. He don’t know more than that now, that’s for sure.”

“Wh—”

“Let’s get back along here a piece. Hell, girl, this’s getting dangerous!” Real, almost boyish excitement in his voice.

A moment or two later, “So…”

“So I was pinned down and lookin’ to die when suddenly this Huey full of Australians comes along. Picked them up a ways back and taking them down to our lines. But the pilot saw me and came down. Brave mother, I thought. Found out later they made him do it: Doc and the rest. They came down and I went for it like a jackrabbit. That line tight there? Jesus, listen to the sound of it! Back a ways more, Miz Mariner: we’ll get some protection from the outrigger.”

Hood was having a good time. To tell the truth, so was Robin. The simple sense of fun kept the very real—momentously increasing—danger at bay.

“I almost made it to the Huey when I fell. Thought I’d tripped: been shot in the leg, ten maybe fifteen yards short. Then there’s this kid. He just jumps out of the side and comes for me. Big, strong guy. He used to work out with weights in them days. Don’t do much
these days. Do ya, Doc?” he yelled at Weary, slapping him on the shoulder as Robin and he tumbled into the sloping bucket of the cockpit.

Weary made no direct reply. His massive, golden body was like a statue as he forced his will through the wheel to the delicate, intricate machine he had built. As if he had not heard what they were saying, he yelled, “I may need some help here.”

“Richard’s stronger than me,” shouted back Hood cheerfully. He had lost at arm-wrestling to Mariner a couple of nights ago and was happy to take his revenge by sending Richard over to help with the wheel now. But Richard welcomed the challenge. While Robin and Sam Hood had been working at the bow of the boat, he had been working at the stern, and, satisfied now that everything there was as safe and secure as he could make it, he was looking for something else to do in any case. Weary moved sideways and Richard covered the Australian’s hands with his own. The impact of trying to control
Katapult
under the circumstances, the elation of it, nearly made the Englishman shout aloud.

Hood continued telling Robin his story. “Weary lifted me up by the shoulder straps and ran me the rest of the way. Like I was a feather!” he shouted. “Up to the Huey in a couple of seconds and hefted me in. The others grabbed me and pulled me up. Sort of rolled me over as they did so and my arm hit him in the head. Knocked his helmet off. Now I was wide awake at the time and my fucking leg was really starting to hurt so I can be damned sure about what happened next. I c’n still see it if I close my eyes. Hell, I don’t even have to close them. He jumped in beside me—well, half on top of me really, and I was just fixin’ to say thanks and sorry about the tin hat or something, when this bullet goes right through his head. I mean I saw the sucker—saw it
go in and saw it come out. Like it was slow motion, you know? And the whole front of his forehead from his hair down to his eyebrows just sort of flapped open. Like it was a door or something. Just opened like a door. Like a trapdoor. It just flapped open and there was all his brains and shit fixing to fall out all over me.”

“What did you do?”

“Never moved so fast. I just gathered that piece of skin and bone in my hand and slapped it back in place. He sort of twisted round till his head was in my lap and lay there looking up at me. I mean—he was wide awake and all, hardly blinking. Didn’t say nothing. Just lay there looking up. After a while my hand starts shaking. I am holding this man’s head together, you know? and the guy is lying there watching me do it. So I starts looking around for some bandages or something but there’s no goddamn medic in sight at all. But one of them Aussie guys there with him is some kind of beach bum and he’s got this sweatband on his head so I says to him can I borrow it for the kid. And he says sure. So by the time we get to the medical men in Khe Sanh, he’s sitting there looking like some hippy, hardly even bleeding, wide awake and sort of grinning and all that’s holding his head together is that sweatband. Never been parted from it since.

“We ended up in the same medical facility in Khe Sanh. Trapped there for a while. So I got to know him. Felt kinda responsible. And the more I found out the worse I felt. I mean the guy was only nineteen. Same age as most of ours. Wasn’t much older myself. But what this kid had done! He was this high-flying scholarship student. Straight A’s. B.A., summa cum laude from his home school. M.A. from somewhere else—he’ll tell you if you ask, he remembers that. And the Ph.D. from Oxford, England. All this by the time he’s nineteen
years old! I mean there was no end to the shit this guy knew. And most of it was spread over the inside of a Huey helicopter—because he tried to help me.

“But he wasn’t Mongoloid, you know? There was no imbecility. No, like, brain damage.” He said the two words in a slow voice and paused to make sure Robin got the message. “He was either totally switched on or totally switched off: Kid Einstein or some kind of cabbage. The doctors told me that’s how it’ll always be. It’s a miracle he’s even the way he is. They were going to put him in some kind of institution but I said no, I’d look after him. Least I could do. You see, he don’t know who he is. Not really. Not deep down. Not anymore. Every time he goes to sleep he forgets. You got to tell him every morning, ‘You’re Doc.’ Then things kinda fall into place. He’s got a family back in Sydney. Nice folks—nothing special, but nice. Might as well be strangers. Show him pictures, he never met them. His home up in Paddington? Never been there. Hell, show him Sydney Harbour Bridge, he’ll ask is it the Golden Gate? Show him the Sydney Opera House he’ll say, ‘What is this?’

“But ask him about Hamlet—it’s like they were brothers. Ask him about quasars or black holes—now there he has lived. Beethoven? Mozart? Now that’s his family. It’s weird. And boats. Nobody seems to know where he picked up this stuff about boats…

“But he did. Oh, brother, did he ever pick up a shitload of stuff about boats…”

They were sitting on the bench at the back of the cockpit by the time he finished speaking. They had been talking there for about three minutes. In all, perhaps eight minutes had elapsed since Weary took the helm; certainly no more than ten. There was nothing else for them to do: their lives lay in the hands of the two men at the helm and, perhaps, in the laps of the gods.

Robin was overcome by a massive wave of emotion—a helpless desire to protect Richard and preserve her family at any cost. But she was all too well aware that there was nothing she could do, and suddenly she was afraid. Her fist closed on Hood’s arm and he looked down at her, surprised. But her face was calm, slightly flushed. Her golden ringlets, soaking, clutched her head despite the wind. Her eyes were sparkling—and how could he know that the light in them came from unshed tears? On the surface, she looked like a girl about some excitement. He half grinned, suddenly feeling less tense himself.

Weary’s hand moved gently out from under Richard’s and the Englishman closed his fist on smooth wood, shifting his feet unconsciously, bracing himself as the wheel tried to hurl him overboard. His concentration was absolute, overriding even the pain in his swollen elbow. His eyes never wavered from the course they were following, at a speed he had never imagined any yacht to be capable of. And yet that speed was increasing steadily. Suddenly the wheel kicked viciously. The angle of the mast clicked nearer upright. And again. He looked up automatically. The angle of the sails had varied slightly too.

Had
Katapult
been alive before, now she became frenetic. Richard could not credit the intensity of what he was feeling. He had never sailed like this before, never known—never dreamed—that it could be like this. Weary was pulling every knot of speed and power possible from his creation, using the outriggers ruthlessly to force the closer-hauled sails into the rushing torrent of the wind. Then he was back at Richard’s side again, eyes busy on sails and instruments alike, pushing down on Richard’s right hand firmly, bringing them over a point or two, sailing across the main thrust of that terrible force, looking for an outer edge.

“
Hood!
” Weary’s bellow was snatched away and hurled forward into the great white spray-wall bearing down on them like an avalanche. Richard’s eyes were drawn inexorably toward it. There was very little else to look at now. It curved up and out, more than two hundred feet high, a dancing cliff of the stuff, the overhang at the top of it shadowed and dark. The heart of it—it was translucent, like a cliff of ice—danced madly as though a column of black fire burned there. But the surface drew the eyes and threatened to numb the mind with its insane activity. Although it had unity and form, it was made up of individual things, all in wild motion. Dots made by fist-size chunks of water hurling round the vortex left-to-right across their port quarter at hundreds of miles an hour. And more than the water. Suddenly there was the hull of the lifeboat, dead men dancing out of it, there for an instant, plainly visible mast high, imprinting itself forever on Richard’s mind, then gone as though it had never been.