The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  He was on the rim of the Great Pearl Bank. The reefs were behind him. Hll was somewhere to his left. Ahead, north, was the tanker route passing through the lighted oil fields.

  On the edge of those sea-lanes was a remarkably bright cluster of golden lights. It looked to be a giant oil platform high above the water and widely surrounded by smaller rigs and derricks, some of which were horizontally connected by lighted pipelines. A big Hovercraft, wallowing in the swells, entered Hardin’s binocular field and stopped outside the platform. Helicopters circled above.

  As the red night deepened, the electric lights and gas flares shone brighter. The dying wind stirred the humid air with whiffs of burning gas. The water reflected the rusty glow of the sky and the faint sounds of engines were everywhere.

  Hardin scanned the hellish scene, looking for a place for the Swan. These were producing oil fields, the monster’s lair, the reason LEVIATHAN existed. He was alien. His boat too small, too white in this place of red water and black steel. Behind him, on the Great Pearl Bank, was the shadowy form of a dark island, enticingly close.

  27

  Six anxious men gathered in a conference room atop Wellhead Number One, a ten-hole oil-pumping platform thirteen miles north of the Great Pearl Bank in the middle of the Persian Gulf. The room was incongruously luxurious. Enormous picture windows edged with thick drapes formed the outer walls between the low ceiling and the thickly carpeted floor. A lavishly stocked bar occupied one corner, an elaborate communications console the other. The big windows shone golden light into the red Gulf sky, topping the platform with the crown of gold that Hardin had seen from twelve miles away.

  Number One belonged to a consortium of Kuwaiti, Iranian, Saudi, and Swiss shareholders and was, as such, as close to neutral territory as the six men could find in the Persian Gulf. The oil fraternity considered Hardin a threat to all and the managers of Number One had willingly lent their facility to the men who were hunting him.

  The Iranian naval commander who had landed on LEVIATHAN and crossed swords with Captain Ogilvy had been hunting Hardin for twenty hours, and the fatigue that etched the pale skin around his eyes showed him to be somewhat older than he had seemed to Ogilvy earlier in the day.

  His Saudi Arabian counterpart was also in uniform, but he wore the khaki of the Air Force. The Arab was a slight, wiry man with glittering eyes, and whenever he mentioned Hardin, he spoke his name as if he were discussing dangerous vermin.

  An unlikely pair observed from the back of the room. One was a tall, swarthy man with a hawk nose who wore the flowing white robes and headdress of a Qataran prince and sipped a glass of orange juice. Beside him was a short, pale, plump-faced American in a white shirt and a narrow black necktie. He drank scotch on the rocks and perspired heavily although the room was air-conditioned to a deep chill. Their eyes flickered in unison to whoever was speaking, and they watched warily, as if, at the first sign of danger, they would crouch back to back like legionnaires in hostile territory.

  The American was the terminal manager of the Hll Island depot; the Qataran, his boss, the operations director of the Qataran oil company, which owned the depot. Occasionally they interrupted the discussions to point out that the storage tanks and loading arms of Hll were of equal importance to the ship LEVIATHAN; finally the American ventured the opinion that the Iranians and the Saudis seemed to care less about Hll than their own honor.

  James Bruce hushed him with a warning glance. They had enough trouble already without antagonizing the military men. He had just flown in from London into Bahrain by Concorde; the oil company that had chartered LEVIATHAN had ferried him to the platform. Exhausted by the long journey and battered by the noise of the helicopter, he had trouble concentrating on the byplay between the Iranian and the Saudi, and he had turned to the sixth man in the room—an Englishman, thank God—for assistance.

  Miles Donner had been very obliging. Before the others arrived, he suggested that Bruce nap for half an hour. Gratefully, Bruce let himself be taken to a comfortable bed in a nearby stateroom. Donner had wakened him an hour later, explaining the extra half hour by saying nothing of importance had occurred. He gave him a cup of thick black coffee, and when Bruce reappeared in the meeting room, Donner poured him a stiff whiskey, which set him up very nicely. He still had trouble concentrating, but he felt confident that Donner would look after his interests.

  He didn’t understand entirely what Donner was doing here. Apparently he was some sort of representative of Israel, and that nation’s secret service had discovered that Hardin was at it again. But in some odd way he had practically taken over the strategy session. He seemed to know a lot about Hardin, and he used his knowledge as a buffer between the Arab factions.

  Bruce gazed out the wide picture windows at the dull yellow patch where the sun had set. Above and around it the sky was taking on a ruddy glow, as it did every night in the Gulf oil fields where the burning gas flares painted the night sky more vividly than any sunset.

  Sixty feet beneath him an enormous Hovercraft tossed in the rough seas. Sleek and new—British built in Southampton—it was heavily armed with surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, deck cannon, and machine guns. The Iranian had arrived on it moments before with a grand flourish of reverse propellers, which hadn’t concealed from the master mariner’s eyes the Hovercraft’s glaring deficiency: It was a bloody pig in rough seas. God help the Iranians if they ever had to fight in a storm.

  The Saudi had come by helicopter. Three helicopters, to be precise. His had landed. Two escort craft, bristling with weapons, circled the wellhead continuously. They were relieved every fifteen minutes as pairs of the gunships shuttled the two hundred miles to Saudi Arabia to refuel.

  Miles Donner paused in his conversation with the Iranian, drew the Saudi officer close, and got the two men talking. Then he disengaged slowly, like a man backing away from a precariously balanced addition to a heaping litter basket, and motioned Bruce to the bar. He mentioned lightly that the denizens of the opposite shores of the Gulf mixed as reluctantly as oil and water, and poured the company captain a fresh drink.

  For a moment, Bruce thought he might be getting sloshed, but he reckoned he could handle one more, and it was very soothing. He was surprised by the way the Arabs took to Donner. None of the scorn you would have expected them to show for a Jew. Donner seemed to guess his thought.

  “The men of the Gulf states are much more reasonable than some of Israel’s other neighbors,” he said with a smile. “We have something in common.”

  “What is that?” asked Bruce.

  “We both have a lot to protect.”

  “What are they arguing about?”

  “Ostensibly,” replied Donner, “they are discussing their claims to the Persian Gulf. In actual fact, they are arguing that they are Arabs and Persians, about which they have been arguing since the dinosaurs put their feet in the air and turned to oil.” His smile dimmed. “It might be amusing if Hardin weren’t still out there. They wasted the last hour of daylight debating jurisdiction—Excuse me, Captain. I’ve got to sort them out again.”

  He hurried across the big room, neatly dodging the managers of the Qataran oil company, and stepped between the Arab and the Iranian with a suggestion that they three study the area charts and plot a cooperative search pattern. Simultaneously, the two officers said they had to speak with their aides, who were standing by aboard their staff vehicles. They picked up telephones at opposite ends of the communications console and spoke rapidly in their own tongues while Donner spread the charts of the Hll oil fields on a conference table.

  The Saudi reported that the helicopter pilot who had spotted a yacht in the Gulf had been shown photographs obtained by radiofacsimile machine from the Nautor boatyard in Pietarsaari, Finland. He was sure he had seen a Nautor Swan 38.

  The Iranians weren’t so sure. While they had a sizable force patrolling the Hll fields in the dark, they were still combing the coves and bays of the Musandam Peninsula in t
he Gulf of Oman. The parties agreed on one fact: Tomorrow’s weather boded well for them. It would be a clear day.

  “That means that Hardin will have to hide,” said Miles Donner, leading them to the conference table. “Where?”

  Unlike most of the dispassionately printed Admiralty charts, those for the southern bight of the Persian Gulf were ablaze with colored ink. The Great Pearl Bank was studded with shoal warnings, islands, and known reefs and overlaid with reminders that the area was not thoroughly charted; but beyond the reefs, for twenty-five miles either side of Hll, the charts had the frantic look of color-coded electronic circuitry as they warned mariners of the sea rigs, wellheads, exploration buoys, mooring sites, submarine pipelines, floating pipelines, barge routes, and loading buoys that posed hazards to navigation in the oil fields.

  “There,” said the Saudi Arabian Air Force colonel. He pointed at the thicket of drilling operations. “He’ll hide among the boats and barges to make it difficult to see him from aloft.”

  “No,” said the Iranian. “He must hide from boats as well.”

  “Where then?”

  “Here.” The Iranian traced the Great Pearl Bank with his swagger stick. “Within the Banks and no more than thirty miles from the sea-lane to Hll.”

  “Why?” asked Donner.

  “Two reasons. There are many, many small islands, all uninhabited and protected from deep-draft patrol boats by the reefs. If I were on a little sailboat I would anchor in a cove beside white sand and cover my boat with a white sail. You’d have to get next to me to distinguish the boat from the glare of the sand.” He smiled at the Saudi. “And you’d never see me from the air.”

  “And would your sail protect you from heat sensors?” the Arab asked scornfully.

  “The sail would reflect as much heat as the sand,” the Iranian snapped, too quickly.

  “Nonsense,” said the Arab.

  Donner sized up the two men. The question of the heat sensors was a good one and the Iranian didn’t know the answer. They couldn’t afford the luxury of finding out tomorrow. “What was your second point, Commander?”

  “I spoke with the captain of LEVIATHAN personally this afternoon. He predicted that Hardin would be in the Persian Gulf before we received the helicopter report. He knows the way the man’s mind works.”

  “Did he say where he would hide?” asked Donner.

  “Yes. He said he would hide on the Banks. He said to look in the reefs.”

  “The reefs won’t hide him from air surveillance,” said the Arab.

  “The islands would and even the reefs might. How long did it take you to find your downed Bell Huey last month? Four days? Five days?”

  The Arab flushed. “It was partly submerged.”

  “The Gulf is big,” Donner said diplomatically. “Very big. Which is why, my friends, our best chance may be to combine our efforts in an air-sea search of a single area.”

  “Very big,” agreed the Arab. “Vast as the desert.”

  “But Hardin is restricted by his speed,” said the Iranian. Spreading his thumb and forefinger like calipers, he straddled Hll on the chart and moved his hand eastward in a sixty-mile swath along the sea-lane. “Eight knots at best under sail. Six under power. Thirty miles maximum in four hours. He can’t afford to stray too far either side of LEVIATHAN’s route. He can’t hide on the Qatar Peninsula, for instance, or deeper than thirty miles into the Pearl Bank.”

  “Do you agree?” Donner asked the Saudi.

  The Air Force man nodded reluctantly, then turned his answer to make the conclusion his own. “Our helicopters are already concentrating on this route.”

  “Perhaps,” said Donner, his voice soft, his manner easy, “perhaps we should concentrate on one side of the route.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Donner rubbed his chin and pretended to study the chart. “Perhaps the Pearl Bank is the most logical place for a small boat, as the captain of LEVIATHAN suggested.”

  “There is no place to hide north of the route,” said the Iranian.

  “There are the oil fields,” said the Saudi.

  “But they are busy places,” said Donner. “The workers there are already on the lookout for a sailboat. There are men on rigs and barges and lanshes all over those waters, night and day. Besides, it is not a place . . .” He searched for a word to describe the grim industrial scale of the oil fields, the filthy waters and the putrid air. “It is not conducive to a small boat. Not compatible with a little sailing yacht.”

  “It is no place for a sailboat,” the Iranian agreed.

  “We must consolidate our effort,” said Donner. “Can you recall your units from the Musandam Peninsula?”

  “If we can use them to search the Pearl Bank,” said the Iranian.

  “But you don’t know those waters,” protested the Arab.

  “What about the pearl hunters?” asked Donner.

  “Of course,” cried the Arab. He nodded excitedly at the Iranian. “We will give you our pearl hunters and fishermen to show you the way. They know the reefs and the coral.”

  “Wonderful,” said Donner.

  “Thank you,” the Iranian said thoughtfully, and Donner guessed that he was wondering how many Saudi spies would be among the pearlers to garner information about Iran’s sophisticated navy.

  “I’ll have them rounded up immediately,” said the Saudi.

  “We’ll have to wait until dawn,” said the Iranian. “We can’t search the reefs at night.”

  “If I may suggest . . .” said Donner.

  “Yes, my friend,” the Saudi said expansively, pleased, it seemed, with the bargain struck.

  “There is one thing we can do tonight,” Donner said softly. “Send your aircraft aloft with searchlights. Sweep the reefs along here.” He pointed at the chart. His voice hardened and, for an instant, thought James Bruce, there was no question that the mild-looking Israeli with the upper-class English accent had taken full charge of the hunt.

  “Force him to keep moving. Don’t let him sleep. Drive him. He’s fagged out already. Perhaps when morning comes there won’t be much of him left.”

  28

  The violent roar of high-speed marine engines shocked him awake. He leaped to the hatch, his mind clinging to sleep, his stomach paining from fear. A shadow raced across the oil-field lights and the flat wake of a planing hull bubbled somewhere past the Swan. Before the clamor had dwindled to an echoing rumble, the shadow vanished in the red darkness.

  The sky had brightened in the hour since the sun had set. A ruddy glow stretched east to west between the Swan and the northern horizon, stoked by the gas flares blazing atop the sea rigs. The night was red with the flames—some near, some far—that flickered like the watchfires of warring giants. Reflecting the fireballs, the Gulf rippled bloodily as if they had washed their swords in it.

  The night was hot, as hot as the day had been before the storm, so hot that it seemed the flames heated it as the sun did the day. The seas had calmed. A hot north breeze, reeking of burned gas, did not disturb them. The Swan still stood between the oil fields and the dark island, fixed by the north breeze and the south-setting current, much as he had left her before he had dozed off at the chart table with his head on the dog-eared Sailing Directions.

  He pumped some seawater into the galley sink and rubbed the warm liquid on his eyes. It smelled of oil. Then he resumed reading the section marked CAUTION:

  Vessels are warned to keep outside of an area about 14½ miles offshore from eastward to south-southwestward of Jazirat Hll, due to the existence of drilling rigs, oil-well structures, mooring buoys, and numerous submarine pipelines.

  Three oil fields have been established in the vicinity. . . .

  Hardin had come out of the Pearl Bank at the southeast end of a chain of rigs and wellheads that extended for nearly twenty-five miles to Hll Island. The oil men would be working night and day. He scanned further, reread the section several times, and tried to force his exhausted mind to sponge
up details.

  A bank with a least mean depth of 10.4m (34 ft.) lies about 17 miles southward of Jazirat Hll. A 90-foot abandoned and unlighted oil rig is charted in the shoalest part of this bank. A LIGHT is shown and a FOG SIGNAL sounded from each of several drilling structures. . . .

  No problem; draft out here wasn’t a worry.

  He set a small jib, but left the main furled. The headsail would pull him quickly enough and he could see better without the big mainsail blocking the sky. There was a considerable amount of helicopter and airplane activity on the south horizon and he caught glimpses of their searchlights raking the water.

  A white sail was a hell of a target for a searchlight. He tied a line to the tail of the jib halyard and ran it back to the cockpit where he secured it within easy reach. Then he put the Swan on a broad starboard tack.

  For the first time in three months he wasn’t concerned with speed. He was close to the sea-lanes—the tanker lights told him that—close to LEVIATHAN’s route—two hours’ run at worst—but first he had to find a hiding place. A place to stash a thirty-eight-foot boat for twelve hours. A place he couldn’t describe. A place he didn’t even know existed. A place he would find more readily plodding at two or three knots through the crimson darkness than if he were racing. Time was against him, however. He had less than ten hours of night left to search the oil fields.

  The Iranian naval commander and Captain Ogilvy were blue-water sailors, deep-sea modern-ship men, and each made the same mistake about the Nautor Swan and the man who owned her. She displaced 16,120 pounds—under eight tons—and weighed less than a few links of LEVIATHAN’s anchor chain. Fully loaded, she could sail in water seven feet deep. And yet she was a deep-water boat, a miniature ship with a fixed keel, and Hardin feared grounding no less than they did.