by Peter Tonkin
“That’s it.” Weary drew his hand back through the riot of his hair above the sweatband on his forehead. Even in the beautiful sunset light, his face looked like his name: weary. And for once there was nothing about the evening he found to be new and exciting. “We either anchor here or go ahead under power. Hood? What does the sounder say?”
“Deep water,” came his reply from the cabin.
“Hell,” said Weary, not really wanting to do anything more. They were on the last of a low flood tide, however, drifting gently north anyway, with nothing seaborne in sight except the distant dhows and the vanishing tanker.
“You want me to take her, Doc?” asked Richard gently. “We can motor over toward Fujayrah. Maybe find an anchorage in ten miles or so.”
“We’ll see,” answered Doc. “Let’s get the sails off her first.” He hit the button. Slowly, jerkily at first, the motors turned. The booms telescoped in and the massive sails vanished into the mast, kicking off clouds of sand as they did so. In the heavy calm, the fine grains showered straight down, starting everyone sneezing except Hood, who was belowdecks. And so it was that he had to call up several times before he could be understood.
“Doc. There’s something registering. Doc. It’s dead ahead. A shoal of some kind I guess. Maybe a ridge. I don’t know. Doc? You asked for an anchorage. This looks like it.”
Half an hour later it was full night. The sky was low and heavy laden with massive stars. Above the distant desert visible through the portholes lay the promise of moonrise, its pale coolness mocking the heat of the air. All the ports and ventilators along Katapult’s sleek sides stood wide, but no hint of breeze came through to ease the humidity in her main cabin as she lay idly at anchor there, as though painted under her riding lights. They had dined lightly off cold tinned meat and canned fruit, but most of it still lay unconsumed on the table before them. It was too hot to eat. It was too hot to do anything much except lie back across the bunks—now doubling as bench-seats around the table—and continue their discussion desultorily, already on the edge of sleep. Only Robin seemed to have any energy, and she was trying to interest the others in some serious planning of tomorrow’s course and what action lay beyond.
As Hood’s charts had been packed away, she pulled out the one she had brought back with her from the Mississippi and, using a plate of melting corned beef and a bowl of warm canned peaches, she spread it flat. “Look,” she said as she did so, “here we are, anchored about fifty miles off Fujayrah…” Her fingers traced the eastings and northings Hood had written in the log until they met at Katapult’s position on the chart. And suddenly she stopped speaking.
The others were slow to notice her silence. Weary and Hood were dozing. Only Richard was paying any kind of attention, and that was pretty scant. “Off Fujayrah. Yes? So?”
But Robin didn’t hear him. She was replotting their position on the chart carefully with rapt concentration, her blonde curls low above the paper. Richard frowned and sat forward, sensing something at once, even as her eyes, suddenly huge, met his across the blue- and sandcolored diagram. But it was not to Richard that she spoke.
“Hood,” she asked urgently, “how old was that chart you were using?”
“Dunno,” Hood answered without opening his eyes. “Part of an old set we got in the Seychelles when you came aboard and we took off north. All our really new charts are of our home waters. Why?”
Richard read, upside-down, partly obscured by Robin’s finger, DANGER. EXPLOSIVES DUMPING GROUND. The words were written in urgent purple beside a dotted circle. A circle at whose heart they were now anchored.
“Maybe we should get the anchor up,” he suggested.
Hood and Weary both leaned forward, pulled out of somnolence by something in his tone. Suddenly they were all on their feet. Hood scooped the plates off the table and hurled the food through the porthole. Everything else went into the bunk beside him and the table was folded away. Then they were up the companion ladder and into the cockpit.
There was light coming from her instruments, through the portholes from the lamps below and from her riding lights above: enough light to see by, even out here. Richard ran easily down the length of her to the anchor chain at her head. It was a fine chain reaching down to a small flanged anchor a hundred or so feet below. Down to that innocent little anchor among all those dangerous, discarded explosives, he was thinking. There could be all sorts down there. In theory, they should all be carefully logged, recorded, made safe, placed in strong containers, and dropped deep. In fact, there was no real control. God alone knew what could be down there, in what sort of boxes, of what sort of age, in what sort of state.
He leaned out over the edge, reaching down to feel the chain, sitting snugly in the hawse hole by the extra deck just beneath him, where the winches were. It told him little enough.
“Engaging anchor-chain winch,” called Weary warningly.
“Clear!” Richard called back. Then he knelt up, holding the low rail at her head, straining to feel her anchor lift safely free of the seabed below him. He felt Katapult come round and heard the water chuckling against her as the winch took up the slack. He heard the chain begin to gather in, link by link. He waited for the rush, the steady rumble of the anchor being winched up.
But he waited in vain.
“Caught fast,” he called to Weary at last.
“Anchor caught fast,” agreed Weary. “I’m slacking off to try again.”
The second attempt was no more successful than the first. Weary slackened off once more and engaged the propeller, moving Katapult to a new position before engaging the winch. It made no difference. The anchor refused to budge. Richard returned along the length of the hull and jumped onto the lazarette. The top of the first rear hatch lifted easily enough and there was a torch handy to shine down past the case of Kalashnikhovs to where the diving equipment was. He had swum in the Gulf and knew about the sharks and the seasnakes there: he was suiting up and going armed. But he was going: someone had to. A half-hour swim, after all, might free the anchor, resecure it safely on the reef, put their minds at rest, and let them all get a decent night’s sleep. On the other hand, if they lost the anchor, it would be watch and watch from here to Bahrain, and no real sleep for days. At the moment, it seemed well worth the risk.
He was suited up and ready to go within minutes, the mouthpiece pushing cold air over his clenched teeth, his left hand holding a submarine torch and his right hand a spear gun. Secured round his waist was an assortment of crowbars looped over his weight belt and cinched tight by Robin’s robust strength. Weary tied the end of a long, strong line just above it and Richard duck-walked to the edge of the cockpit. They hoisted him up and turned him round. He held his face mask in place as well as he could and tumbled backward into the oil-dark sea.
It was slack water. The currents around him were as still as the breezes above. It was no problem to hang in the water and test his torch, orienting himself carefully until he could see Katapult’s hull. Then he followed it to the anchor chain, careful to swim outside the sleek sweep of the starboard outrigger.
Once more he hung in the water, holding on to the chain with his right hand, half exasperated with himself for bringing the spear gun, which was in the way already, flashing the torch out into the threatening blackness all around. Nothing moved. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, Richard upended himself and began to follow the chain downward, head first.
Five minutes later his torch beam revealed a narrow trench into which the chain plunged, amid a jumble of boxes, seaweed-covered, barnacled, apparently dangerously ancient. He jerked to a halt, just in time. As he came upright, his flippers grazed the topmost box of the whole crazy pile. A stingray, disturbed by his arrival, lifted itself into lazy visibility and floated elegantly into the darkness.
Richard settled to the seabed and began to look around. It seemed that he was on some kind of hilltop, though his torch beam would not go far enough for him to be sure. A thin ridge s
carcely wider than Katapult herself coming and going into the darkness on either hand. On either side of it, hillsides plunged down within scant feet to depths he could not begin to estimate. Diagonally across this ridge ran a thin crack, perhaps a yard wide, apparently infinitely deep. Into this the anchor had fallen, and here it had wedged.
All he had to do was to slide his crowbar into the trench and he should be able to get the anchor free. There were some heavy-looking rocks farther down that would hold Katapult against the night’s calm and sluggish tides. He put down the spear gun, concerned that it might get tangled up in his efforts, took the steel crowbar from his belt, and moved forward. Already planning what to do with the rocks and the anchor—should he prove strong enough to carry it on his own—and wondering whether he should check those nearby boxes as well, he thrust the crowbar down toward the hook of the trapped anchor, only to hurl back, shouting with surprise as the eel attacked.
What sort of eel it was, he never knew. He was no expert and could have made no distinction between types. He remained ignorant also of its precise size, but he related it easily enough to the scale of his own body. Its head, jaws fastened onto the crowbar, was almost the size of his own head. The body that uncoiled with breathtaking rapidity out of the shadows seemed as broad as his thigh, perhaps as his waist. And it was longer than he was.
The power of the thing was awesome. Only his shockstrengthened grip kept him attached to the steel crowbar as the two of them tumbled backward end over end. His only clear thought was an overpowering command to his brain to keep breathing regularly. His lungs obeyed but the demands of galvanic action taxed their calm rhythm severely. Time ceased to have any meaning for him. His left hand, torch dangling from its wrist-strap, grabbed the far end of the bar, forcing the eel’s head away from his own, and they rolled back into the darkness, face to face as though the eel were a rabid dog at his throat. He felt its length whip round him and begin to squeeze. Wildly he wondered whether these things could crush you like anacondas. Then his shoulders crashed into angular solidity and he had the strangest feeling that he was tumbling down stairs and the image was so overpowering, so disorienting, that it took him a second to realize what had actually happened. The eel had pushed him against the pile of discarded explosives boxes under Katapult’s keel.
He thrust forward with all the power at his command, feeling the unsteady pile crumbling around him. The momentum of the eel’s attack was gone in any case and so he found himself moving back toward the crack where the monster lived—and not a moment too soon. As they rolled across the ridge, so the pile of boxes collapsed, some of them disintegrating to spill their contents out onto the seabed. Invisibly in the darkness, a small black disk, some four inches in diameter and two deep, flew lazily toward the crack in the ridge. It was well wrapped in clear plastic, which should have kept it waterproof, but as it landed, so the plastic ruptured, and instantly a thin trail of bubbles coiled upward. On the next bounce, a second later, the disk attained the black cleft and tumbled in. Two seconds later it exploded.
One instant, Richard was aware only of his blind test of strength. The next there was a flash of light and a detonation that made his ears ring. And the eel was gone. Dazzled and deafened, he fell to his knees on the thin ridge, pulled the torch into both fists, and swept its puny beam around in a tight arc.
Nothing.
The eel, more sensitive than he, had been more affected by the explosion and had swum away. No sign of it remained.
He stayed exactly where he was, on his knees, breathing slowly and regularly, waiting for his heart to slow. Waiting for the jumping in his limbs to still. Waiting for the next explosion.
Nothing.
The line around his waist, tangled around much of his body now, jerked suddenly and set his recovery back somewhat. He jerked in return to let them know he was all right, then waited. It took some time, but at last his heartbeat steadied, his breathing became normal and his limbs still. He untangled himself carefully and returned to the trench.
His torch beam showed him the mess the eel and he had made of the boxes. That crazy pile was now strewn willy-nilly across the seabed, but it looked as though only two were open. A cursory inspection revealed many boxes to be the same as the two that had burst, some distinguished by having a large X marked upon their sides. Both burst boxes contained flat black disks wrapped in clear, strong plastic. The look of the things was familiar.
Sidetracked into rummaging through his capacious memory, Richard was paying scant attention to the scene in front of him where the stem of the anchor protruded from the cleft in the narrow ridge, but suddenly a movement there pulled his distracted gaze into sharp focus and he realized wryly what the eel had done: it had run home. And its home was beside the anchor. If he tried to free it again, it would attack again. This looked like a stalemate.
Abruptly a shrill whining filled his head and an instinct trained into him years ago at diving school whipped his left hand toward his face plate. The luminous display on his diving watch was flashing at him. Four minutes and counting down. He should simply give up and return to the surface now.
But he would be damned before he would let himself be beaten by a fish.
Then, because he was thinking of something else entirely, he remembered what the black disks were. They were thunderflash grenades.
He didn’t think beyond that. He didn’t bother to weigh the implications. He knew what they were. He knew that they worked. He knew how to get rid of the eel—perhaps even without hurting it. Now, where had he put the spear gun?
It was easy enough to attach the grenades to the spears. They were wrapped in plastic just loose enough to push the spear points through. The first two he tried proved disappointingly ineffective. Neither detonated, though he was certain he had armed them correctly. The third was much more satisfactory. Almost as soon as he thrust the spearpoint through the plastic and twisted the top of the disk, a thin line of bubbles burst into the torchlight. He took careful aim and fired again. The spear sped straight and true. Richard curled his arm over his eyes. A second or two later there was a detonation from deep within the trench. Richard never knew whether the eel survived, but it was certainly absent when he moved to free the anchor.
Partway through the process, the line around his waist jerked urgently again.
And that, in the end, was what made up his mind.
Chapter Seven
The Gulf.
“Thank you, Rass al Kaimah. Multihull Katapult leaving Hormuz inshore traffic zone now…” Hood consulted the piece of paper Weary had just passed to him. “Position fifty-six-fifteen east, twenty-six-twenty north. Time logged at…”
“One-thirteen, local,” announced Robin, her clear eyes on the chronometer.
“…thirteen thirteen hours local time. Inbound on a heading of…”
“Due west,” called Richard, who held the con, his gaze flicking back up from the compass to their course as he spoke.
“…due west for Bahrain Island. ETA at Manama Harbor…”
“Eighteen hundred tomorrow,” said Weary without even glancing up from the chart table where he was plotting their course with practiced ease.
“…eighteen hundred hours tomorrow. Are there any special warnings or standing orders in force, over?” Hood drew an ebony hand down over his smooth, perspiring face. His short, black curls were jeweled with moisture.
“Good afternoon, Katapult, this is Rass al Kaimah,” said the radio clearly. “We have you at fifty-six degrees and fifteen minutes east, twenty-six degrees and twenty minutes north on an inbound heading due west for Manama harbor, Bahrain Island, with an ETA at eighteen hundred hours local time tomorrow. There are no special warnings in force at this time. We expect the weather to remain as it is, though the wind may strengthen from the south during the day due to the unusually low pressure over the center of Iran. There may be light northerly winds during the hours of darkness. On your heading, you will pass south of Fate but north of Jesirat
bu Musa. Beware of oncoming tanker traffic beyond Fate. You will enter the Iranian advisory zone at Jesirat bu Musa. I assume you have already contacted Bandar Abbas, over?”
“Katapult, affirmative, over.”
“Good. Then you should proceed, Katapult. Oh, and post a lookout. There may be mines in the waters south of Fate.”
“Say again, Rass al Kaimah?”
“Mines in the waters south of Fate.”
“Robin,” said Weary over the top of the radio message. “You’re on watch. Up and out.”
“I read you, Rass al Kaimah. Watches have been posted. Will advise you of any change. Katapult over and out.”
Hood flipped the radio to general receive and turned it down to a background babble. “Mines,” he said, his voice disgusted. “Jesus! Is there anything in these waters that doesn’t burn or blow up?”
Keeping watch was not Robin’s idea of good fun. Kneeling on the foredeck gingerly, careful not to burn herself, she tried to get comfortable without obscuring Richard’s view. His face was behind the small windscreen at her left hip. Once in place, she tried to concentrate on scanning the sea all around the multihull. But it was hard, because of the heat. The Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman had been nothing compared to this. The brisk south wind brought no relief from the power of the sun. It was not moving as English breezes seemed to do, with a cool will of its own, but because it was being sucked sullenly from one hot place to another. And it was so humid that the sails dripped with moisture. Robin’s hair, already perspiration-soaked, curled wildly, and her heavy clothing stuck to her. It was, literally, like a sauna—and in the overpowering heat of it, she was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved pullover, a scarf, and a hat. The fact was that any flesh left bare to the sun would blister in seconds and burn in minutes. Sunstroke was a very real danger. They had started taking salt-tablets at dawn—which had caused her morning sickness to extend itself until midday.