by Peter Tonkin
“Christ!” blasphemed Weary, disgusted. “That was too close!”
Hood’s hand slapped down on the radio and it suddenly jumped to life, emitting a frenzied shriek, which, had it come scant seconds earlier, would have warned them of their danger. The radio had been fading in and out for some time now. They had given up trying to regain contact with Angus El Kebir but had been relying on it as a makeshift substitute for their damaged radar and communications equipment by picking up any strong signals from ships in the vicinity. A reliance obviously misplaced.
Weary took the wheel back from Richard and swung Katapult’s eye a degree or two north. At once, almost as though his casual action had summoned it, a sluggish breeze kicked in behind them and an air of purpose returned to the sleek craft even as she wallowed over the last heave of Mississippi’s wake.
“We should have stopped her,” observed Richard, half seriously.
Robin nodded, following his thoughts with ease. The American admiral, officer commanding that fleet, was uncle and godfather to Bob Stark, Prometheus’s kidnapped chief engineer. But they already knew, from Angus’s increasingly faint messages over the last thirty-six hours, that even closer family ties than that had failed to influence State’s current policy of noninterference in the Gulf. Bob Stark’s father, senior senator from Massachusetts and close friend to the President himself, had been met with charm, sympathy, and cold comfort at the White House.
A brittle calm descended on Katapult’s cockpit, compounded of reaction to the shock of near-collision, a corrosive feeling of helplessness and—in contrast—a sense of having taken one small step toward some as yet undefined goal. It was a strange, undecided sensation that accorded well with this unsettling sea.
Away southwest across the inshore traffic zones, the great red cliffs of Rass al Hadd wheeled aft as Katapult swung in toward the coast away from the busy deepwater sea lanes, and the long black hull of a supertanker, low and fully laden, loomed over the northern horizon, more like a force of nature than a man-made thing.
Then, “There’s another one dead aft as well,” called Robin softly, and all except Weary glanced back to see the still-shimmering mist-wall part like a curtain as the mountainous jut of another, unladen, tanker’s stem thrust out toward them, surprisingly close at hand. Awed by the massiveness of it, they watched as the VLCC gathered itself inexorably out of the haze. The first twenty vertical feet of its side, nearest the water, was dull rust red and banded with vague lading marks up to the sickly green of the Plimsoll line. The next forty feet were dead black, a basalt cliff thrusting through the sea. And when her bridge solidified out of the blinding mist, like a pallid block of flats seven clear stories above that, even the eighty sheer feet of Katapult’s mast was dwarfed.
At once the wind died, blocked by the massive bulk, leaving them to wallow once more, telltales drooping dejectedly, in the doldrums of its huge wind shadow. Richard found himself shivering. From down here the sheer size of this machine—whose length could be measured in quarters of miles and whose height above the waterline could be counted in skyscraper stories and whose displacement could be weighed in quarters of millions of tons—was simply terrifying. He thought of the story he had so glibly told Hood about the felucca found wedged across the bows of his own tanker, the first Prometheus, and he remembered how they hadn’t even felt the impact of collision.
They were all so lost in their thoughts and the sheer scale of the tanker that they paid scant attention to the helicopter buzzing busily toward them low over the swells of its wake. Skipping over the sea it came, sullen sunlight blazing off the domed perspex of its windows. Only when the purposeful line of its flight path became obvious did Robin stir. “Hey,” she said. “Richard, are they coming over to us?”
“I believe they are…” Richard glanced over at Weary and Hood. They were both standing beside the wheel though neither of them had a hand on it—Katapult dead in the water until the tanker passed and the wind returned.
“Ahoy, Katapult.” The cry was almost lost in the helicopter’s own engine noise. None of them replied. The helicopter dropped its pert nose and arced toward them like a guided missile, darkening the water with the wind of its passage.
“Better get the sails off her, I think,” said Richard. Weary’s hand moved. The whine of the sail-furler began and was lost at once.
“AHOY, KATAPULT. IS CAPTAIN MARINER ABOARD?”
“HERE!” cried Richard and Robin together. They both held captain’s papers. They both waved. The helicopter bore U.S. Navy markings—perhaps they were going to talk to Admiral Stark after all.
Within moments the helicopter was hovering little more than mast high above them, Katapult stirring uneasily in the downwash of the rotors. But the chopper had ridden over on the first breeze from behind the tanker and Weary let her head fall away until the wind was dead astern and the craft was sitting more comfortably.
Then, abruptly, there came a whine from the helicopter’s side high above. Something was being lowered toward them.
Richard leaped up onto the after-section of the deck and stood there, looking up, his eyes shaded against the glare. It was a harness on a long line. He caught it easily and strapped it around his torso with practiced ease. Then he paused.
Robin knelt on the bench looking back at him, thinking inconsequentially how romantic he was in his whites, legs spread against Katapult’s action, shirt collar up, crisp cotton molded to his lean, firm body by the wind, hair tousled wildly by the thundering gale of it. He grinned wolfishly at her—his first smile since the news had come in. He simply couldn’t resist: this was his idea of really good fun. For a moment it had managed to overcome that huge anger she had felt growing in him day by day since Angus had broken the news about her father and their ship. Emotion brought tears to her eyes and when he opened his arms she ran to him thinking only to hug him to her as tightly as possible.
He said something to her the moment their bodies met but his mouth was full of her hair and it sounded simply like, “Syrup.”
Syrupy or not, she thought fiercely, I love you, Richard Mariner; and she hugged him until her shoulder joints popped. There was a click and a sudden pressure in the small of her back.
“Stand in the stirrup,” he yelled again, and, an intrepid horsewoman since her youth, she kicked her foot into the dangling metal automatically.
“Okay!” bellowed Richard, and they swung up and out.
She glanced down once, understanding, to see Katapult falling, spinning away on the silver, white-webbed sea. Then she buried her face in Richard’s chest and waited to be pulled aboard the helicopter.
As soon as the harness was unbuckled, Robin was off. She loved helicopters and, while Richard was content with his licenses to drive cars and command ships, Robin also held current licenses to fly small planes and helicopters, too. “Okay if I go on up?” she asked the bemused Navy man who had pulled them aboard. He nodded, still helping Richard with the straps and buckles, but she was already gone to crouch between the pilots’ seats, eyes avidly scanning the instruments and the view.
The monsoon closed around them at once, buffeting the little craft, causing it to swoop and dance, wrapping it in dazzling mist. Automatically Robin pulled out her sunglasses—a battered pair of flyer’s glasses with silvered mirror lenses—and slipped them on her nose. She didn’t even notice that the pilot and copilot wore identical protection. She crouched between them for all the world as though she really belonged there, a part of the crew herself.
Unlike Robin, Richard was glad to jump out of the helicopter onto the blustery afterdeck of the Mississippi. The sheer size of the old American warship almost tamed the monsoon seas she was steaming across, but every now and then a trough would take her head and she would dip and roll, pitch and heave in a corkscrew motion, shouldering off a great hissing glacier of foam. It was quite enough to unsettle some of the nearby sailors, who glanced almost enviously at the rock-steady progress of the nearby tankers, but not eno
ugh to complicate the landing or to slow the Mariners as they ran after their escort up toward the steel-gray mountain of the bridge-house.
Admiral Walter Stark received them in his office. The three of them had first met five years ago in Cannes where his California-class cruiser Baton Rouge, then part of the Mediterranean fleet, had been welcoming visitors aboard. But they had known each other for much longer—ever since Bob Stark, his favorite nephew and godson, had joined the Heritage Mariner fleet as an engineer.
“Robin. Richard.” He rose and strode toward them from behind his tidily piled desk as soon as they came through the door. “This is a bad business in every way!” His square, craggy face was lined with concern. His intelligent, deep-set brown eyes full of sympathy. He had known Sir William Heritage since soon after the Second World War. His involvement in the affair could hardly have been more personal.
“Walt,” Richard said, shaking the American’s broad hand while Robin went on tiptoe to kiss his weathered cheek. Then the admiral’s eyes met those of their escort and the young officer was gone at once.
“Sit down, sit down. My steward’ll be in with coffee in a moment. I’d like to invite you to lunch, but if I did, God knows it’d be a long flight back to Katapult.”
Richard sat, suddenly almost overcome by the sensations of being back aboard a great steel-sided ship. Katapult for the last few days had been all rush and hiss, the slightest vibration of sleek multihull through water, the rumble of her sails and the song of the wind in her stays. Mississippi was all throb and thrust—that corkscrew stagger in place of Katapult’s leap, the distant, unvarying rumble of the engine, the insistent, immediate throb of everything around him.
A sharp tap on the door preceded the entry of a lean young man bearing a trayful of cups and saucers. He swayed easily across to the admiral’s desk as Mississippi shuddered, apparently quite at ease while she dipped and heaved back; but when Robin accepted her coffee, she noticed a drop or two had been spilled and the simple fact of this brought to her mind Twelve Toes Ho, chief steward on Prometheus, a man who had never, to her knowledge, spilled a drop of anything he had ever carried. A man now, with all the others, held captive like her father. Perhaps even alongside her father. Her cheeks flushed with ill-contained rage. Her hands shook.
“Right,” said Admiral Stark as the steward closed the door. “Update. No change in your situation that I’m aware of. Helen Dufour at Heritage House in London still has no news of your father, Robin. Nobody has, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has his ear pretty close to the ground, so I’m told. Nobody knows where Bill is or who’s holding him. Beirut still seems the best bet, but the PLO isn’t talking and not even the Shi’ites are claiming any responsibility. We just have to hang on in there and wait.”
“But it has to be tied to the taking of Prometheus!” exploded Robin. “Nothing else makes any sense!”
“I agree with that,” snapped Richard. “We’ve been over and over this endlessly. It has to be part of a concerted effort. Blackmail of some kind.”
“But who by?” asked the admiral, his quiet drawl gentle, soothing the English couple’s too-evident anger. “And to what end? What have you got that someone wants that badly? Who wants to hurt you and your company like this?”
“It could be anything, it could be nothing.” Robin now, reiterating parts of conversations shared with Richard, Hood, and Weary during the long haul north to Rass al Hadd. “If it was just one of them—either Prometheus or my father—then it might be bad luck. Nothing aimed specifically at us at all. But both together—there has to be a pattern.”
“Any more news about Prometheus?” asked Richard as soon as Robin fell silent.
“Nary a word. She’s been moved down the Gulf away from the shipping at Kharg Island. The last report I had was that she was in that little bay just north of Bushehr. Anchored in five to ten fathoms, according to my charts.” He gestured to the desk and Richard suddenly realized the chart was laid out there, ready to be consulted. But he had a chart of the Gulf in his head as accurate as any on paper. As he got up, he said, “That’s what, two hundred miles due north of Bahrain?”
“One hundred and eighty-five miles due north of Manama Harbor,” said Robin, already at Walt’s shoulder, poring over the chart that was so much more up-to-date than the one in Katapult’s cabin: and it did have Prometheus’s present whereabouts precisely plotted on it, observed Richard as he joined them. Just on the edge of the bay there, under the eyes of the little Iranian airport—though there was no proof of any Iranian involvement or even suggestion of it, so far. As the admiral had said, anchored in about fifty feet of water.
Unladen then, almost certainly. Sitting high and hard to get aboard. Damned hard for armed men to board unsuspected…
He glanced up and found both of them watching him, gray eyes and brown eyes alike alive with speculation. Mississippi corkscrewed. Foam thundered back along her starboard foredeck. Spray splattered onto the porthole glass beside him and foam hissed away into the scuppers. “If we could get aboard Prometheus, then we could begin to find out what is really going on,” he said. His voice was flat. Level. The throb of his rage just held in check by an iron effort of will.
Richard was fiercely aware that they were actually discussing a kind of war. A small war against an unknown enemy, waged by himself and such warriors as he could summon, fought with such weapons as he and they could find, against such armaments as the terrorists might hold, and to be fought on the decks of the flagship of his tanker fleet with more at risk than he dared to calculate.
“My hands are tied,” warned Admiral Stark. “No men or matériel. Not a gun. Not a round.”
“Radio?” asked Robin. “Our first meeting off Rass al Hadd should prove to you what a danger to shipping we are in our present state.”
“Done!” Stark grinned. His eyes, the image of his godson’s, sparkled with fierce joy at being able to help after all. “And now you come to mention it…”
Half an hour later, Walter Stark’s desk was piled high with the sort of equipment the enthusiastic, safety-conscious admiral thought to be essential for the protection of Katapult in her present condition from the dangers of shipping in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf.
A powerful, reliable radio. A portable switchboard with several portable VHF radiotelephone handsets. A sextant, very nearly the work of art that Richard remembered John Higgins always kept aboard Prometheus, and the admiral’s own since boyhood. A full range of charts, notices to mariners, and updates.
Stark surveyed the pile, then looked up cheerfully, catching the eye of the President’s portrait on the wall above the desk. Richard and Robin followed his gaze. “You know,” said the admiral, “I’ve a feeling he’s watching us fairly closely. Maybe I should have turned his picture to the wall…”—he rubbed his great, hard hands gleefully—“…but I’ll be damned if I think he would mind!”
“So there are four of us,” Richard was summing up after two long days’ worth of arguments. “Although for the life of me I don’t see why you and Doc want in on this, Sam.”
Hood, down in the cabin, hunched over his new toys, simply shrugged. Doc pretended not to hear, his eyes on the far horizon, the helm easy in his great hands.
“We’ve enough equipment to navigate to the moon…”
“Mars, if’n we want,” interjected Hood happily.
“…and back. One experimental trimaran, almost fully functional…”
“We can fix the radar easy given the equipment and the time,” said Weary. “Rest of the stuff’s fine.”
“…and six Kalashnikhov AK-47 assault rifles, old but unused,” Richard persisted.
“Fine guns,” said Robin. “Tough. Reliable.”
“And with this we propose to engage an unnumbered quantity of armed terrorists, possibly the whole of the Palestine Liberation Organization and conceivably the Iranians to boot.”
“So what else do we need?” asked Weary.
Richard
opened his mouth, but it was Robin who answered: “Help! All the help we can get.”
It was thirty-six hours since Mississippi’s helicopter had dropped them back onto Katapult’s lazarette. Thirtysix hours filled with an urgent drive to reach the Gulf as soon as possible. After one long, fast day’s sailing, they had anchored briefly in the anchorage area north of Muscat off the Omani coast. They had left on the dawn breeze this morning and a fitful southerly, sucked north by tremendous heat beginning to build in the desert fastnesses of Iran, had pushed them slowly another hundred miles up the coast. It had been a hot, hard, frustrating sail. Now, as the heat died, the darkness gathered, and the faltering wind began to ebb away, they were coming onto longitude 57 degrees east from Greenwich, latitude 25 degrees north of the equator, some fifty miles out from Fujayrah in the Gulf of Oman. Here, too, they proposed to anchor, if their still functioning echo-sounder could find them a bank or shoal a little nearer the surface than the deep water they had sailed all day. Then they could rest up for the long run through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf tomorrow.
The sun was setting on their port beam, bleeding down out of a lower sky gilded with flying sand. Even this far out, the wind blowing from Oman and the Emirates carried enough fine grains to itch scalps, gum eyes, tickle noses, and crunch between teeth. The air should have smelled of salt overlain with hints of sage and tamarisk from the desert. Instead it smelled of oil. The air here, all the way from Rass al Hadd to Shatt al Arab, always seemed to smell of oil.
Another huge tanker pushed inexorably past, long and low in the water ten miles to starboard heading south, her upper works a blaze of rose and ruby. A fleet of dhows, gull-winged, passed farther north, heading for the bay of Khawr Fakkan on the coattails of the wind that had deserted Katapult already.