The Fire Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Whatever was happening, whatever squall was coming down on them, he would awaken the others only when he was ready to get Katapult under way. Either he looked in the lifeboat now or nobody would ever look in it. He had hesitated for less than a second and he moved.

  Even as he stepped down into the floating charnel house of the lifeboat, one thing became obvious—this boat had also been strafed. Strafed from wave-top level. The scene came vividly alive in his mind’s eye: the huddle of men trying to pull their shipmates aboard, the bullets going among them, the remorseless sharks coming. His face expressionless, Richard secured a line to Katapult’s low rail and began to check more carefully. There were no documents, no radio or navigation equipment in sight. But the corpses were clustered—piled—in the bottom of the lifeboat, their arms reaching upward like the tentacles of sea anemones, seeming to wave in the rising wind. If he wanted to check further and get at any of the lockers, he would have to undertake the grim business of moving them.

  The most obvious place to start was at the stern, where the fewest corpses and the largest lockers were. He began to move down the boat and found his attention caught not by the corpses but by Robin, toward whom he was moving. The sight of her called to him and he made his way toward her carefully. At the stern, he paused, holding the lower end of the boathook and looking up along its length at the beloved figure standing mere feet away tense and strong, her eyes closed, her face blank. A feeling of love and pride overwhelmed him and, had she not been beyond his reach he would have held her tightly to him.

  Then something forced his eyes to look past her, downwind, to the place toward which the haze and spray were rushing. In that instant, the mist was plucked away.

  And the monster was revealed.

  “Oh, my God!”

  He shook the boathook and she jumped awake. “Robin! Get below! Get Weary and Hood. Now!”

  Jesus! How could he not have known? How could he not even have suspected? The wind, the mist, the spume, everything, not blown but sucked. Sucked into the roaring, thunderous gyre of it. Sucked to whatever eternity awaited at the other end of it.

  Robin dropped the boathook on the cockpit sole and started to run below—when she caught her first glimpse of its broad white shoulder whipping into its flat black cloud-base head. With wondering eyes she traced the sinuous, sinister curve of it down, down inexorably to the broad foot, wreathed in madly dancing spray. And suddenly she became aware of just how solid the air felt streaming so rapidly past her; and how swiftly and forcefully it was taking Katapult along with it.

  “Dear God!” she breathed and hit the cabin door.

  It was dark and hot, quiet and still—a numbing contrast to the increasing bedlam above. Once through the door she had to force herself to further motion. An outrageous idea came that she could just curl up down here with the men she had come to fetch, pull the blankets safely over her head, and hide…

  She hit the light switch.

  Both men had collapsed on the long bench-seats on either side of the central table without even bothering to open out the bunks. Neither one stirred at the sudden brightness; they were insulated by exhaustion from light as well as from the ungainly motion of the yacht and the growing din of the wind. Weary was closest. Without further thought, she ran across to him on suddenly unsteady feet.

  He was lying, fully dressed, on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, laid out like a dead man. Two strides took her up the length of him and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wake up!” she called. His headband was crushed into his long right hand like a child’s security blanket. His curly hair fell forward in a cowlick into his restless, sleeping eyes. “Come on!” she insisted, shaking him with all her might. “Wake up, damn it!”

  And his eyes flew open.

  She had never seen anything like it in her life. The eyes opened, deep blue and every bit as fathomless as the waterspout outside, sucking at something inside her with the same relentless intensity.

  His hands were on her shoulders just as hers were on his, shaking her as she was shaking him. And he was screaming at her as well, screaming as his body shot upright. She had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes. “Who am I?” yelled Weary at her.

  There was no knowledge in those eyes, no recognition. Nothing. They were the eyes of a terrified child, one who does not even know why it feels fear. “Who am I?” Weary screamed. And Robin was stunned, rendered completely helpless by the shock of it.

  Weary was sitting completely upright now, shaking his head from side to side. The hair flew out of his eyes to show his forehead, high, white, pinched in impossibly at the temples.

  No. Not pinched in. Crushed in.

  She was unable to tear herself away from his demented gaze. The last thing she saw before Hood hit her, out of the corner of her eye, was Weary’s left temple, caved in to a shadowed hollow, starred with bright red scar tissue.

  As soon as Robin leaped into action, Richard turned, too. The lifeboat began to pitch severely as soon as the boathook was free, hurling itself back against the bow rope like a willful puppy fighting a leash. The movement made it hard for him to work, but he refused to give up even now. Brutally, for time was too short for him to show proper respect, he heaved the sternmost bodies away, uncovering the lockers. His eyes still busy among the filthy, oozing, twisted pile for any scraps of information, any telltale personal possessions they might have brought with them. More than one dead fist clasped a worn Koran, but that was all. He heaved them aside and tore the doors open. The stern lockers revealed nothing more than a bilgelike well reaching down to the keel, full of seawater, blood, and excrement. He straightened.

  The great white whiplash of the waterspout seemed to leap toward him as he moved. The wind howled louder, plucking back stinging spray from the white horses that suddenly surrounded him, its strength roaring up the Beaufort scale with inconceivable rapidity. Hell! Where were Weary, Hood, and Robin?

  He turned, spreading his feet to gain stability, and then a hand grasped at his leg.

  Hood hit Robin in a sort of American football charge, knocking her back onto the seat. Then he was sitting opposite Weary where she had been. He was saying something in a repeated, gentle monotone, voice lazy and hands busy. “You’re Doc,” he was saying. “It’s okay. It’s cool. You’re Doc and you’re all right.” As he talked his fingers loosened the Australian’s grip on the sweatband, easing the bright elastic toweling free.

  “It’s fine, Doc. No sweat. You are Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen…”

  As soon as the sweatband was clear, he began to stroke Weary’s hair back as a mother does with a child, as a horseman soothes a frightened foal. The forehead he revealed was huge, bone white, almost false.

  Jesus Christ! thought Robin, it’s…

  And then it was gone. Hood was fixing the sweatband round Weary’s head, hiding the hideous scars at his temples, concealing the huge bulge of that forehead. And suddenly there were two voices reciting the simple catechism, “Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight.” And Hood was turning toward her while Weary’s hands went to that huge, wounded head of his.

  “What’s up, doll?” The light normality of his tone shocked her back to reality more quickly than anything else could have done.

  “Waterspout, dead ahead,” she said.

  Richard actually cried out aloud with shock, his own left hand reaching down at lightning speed, closing over a cold, hard hand. One of the corpses, moved by the rocking of the boat, had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard’s clothing. The material of his trousers twisted through a frozen, insensible grasp. The very movement of something as cold and clammy as this caused him to step back with revulsion.

  The last body tilted over, raising its hand in a bizarre simulation of a cheerful wave. The next man to him, unseeing eyes fixed on Richard’s, seemed to revive too, as the whole boat, unbalanced by Richard’s abrupt mo
vement, rocked. Richard fell to his knees. And the moment that he did so, something caught his eye. At the bottom of the pile of corpses lay that of a slim figure—almost a boy, hardly a man. Most of his head was missing, but his body was unmarked. It was hunched over, with its back to Richard, but it suddenly stood out from the rest because it was wearing a uniform jacket. Not a deck officer’s or an engineer’s, Richard tugged the khaki shoulder, but the corpse refused to move. Richard glanced over his own shoulder, suddenly desperate. The waterspout was getting too close for comfort and there was still no sign of Robin, Hood, or Weary. He tugged again at the dead man’s shoulder.

  The body abruptly turned over as if giving up the fight. In the sodden breast pocket was a blotched white radio message. Richard knelt carefully, angling his body to give maximum protection from the wind, and opened it to look at once. It was written in sinuous Arabic script, as impenetrable as the writing on the crates in the dead ship’s hold had been. But the layout of the flimsy form was familiar enough. There was a space where the name of the ship should be entered. A space for the time. A space for the message. He glared at that first space with almost manic intensity, willing the strange curves of the writing indelibly into his memory. It was nothing more to him than a pattern of lines and dots. But it had to be the name of the doomed ship. The radio officer on every ship he had ever heard of filled in these forms in exactly the same way. This had to be the name of the ship. Then another thought sprang into his mind. If this was the radio officer, then…

  He crumpled the message into his fist and leaned forward; at last he was rewarded. Under the boy’s legs, right at the bottom, providentially wrapped in plastic, was a radio. Richard leaned over, muscles in his legs, back, and belly jerking to keep him upright in the restless boat, and caught hold of it.

  Just as he made this move, the next corpse at the boat’s side followed the other toward the waterspout, pulling the radio operator’s corpse upright as it did so. A cold dead hand clutched at Richard’s face, stiff fingers driving at his eyes as if attempting to protect the precious radio. Richard reacted without conscious thought, driven by primitive instinct. He clutched at the icy forearm and pushed it away, grabbed the slimy shirtfront, and heaved the corpse overboard. It was only then that he realized how he had been betrayed; tricked by the dead men. The radio message had been wadded in the fist he had used to fight off the dead radio operator. As he released the shirtfront, so the flimsy paper slipped through his fingers, too, and the greedy wind snatched it immediately, whirling it away into the stormy sea.

  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? Jesu
s, 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.”