The Fire Ship

by Peter Tonkin

In the agonizingly clear distance, sharpened to uncommon focus by the activity of the south wind, a tanker loomed, superreal. Robin could see every detail of it, every line and plane and surface.

  She shifted position slightly, trying to get some shade from the sail, while resisting the temptation to start thinking about cold drinks. It was less than half an hour since she had had one and she was parched already. Instead, she thought back, past that horrific hour over the explosives dumping zone to that one word she had said when they were discussing what they most needed in order to take back Prometheus and get word of her father:

  “Help!”

  It had not been a cry in the wilderness, of course. It had been the beginning of a series of practical maneuvers. For they could summon help if they needed it. Help was as close as a call to Angus El Kebir. Robin allowed herself a brief indulgence. Of all Richard’s friends, Angus was her favorite—apart from C. J. Martyr and Salah Malik, both of whom shared the unassailable distinction in her eyes of having saved Richard’s life. In her mind, she called Angus “The Red Beard,” for all the world as though he were a heroic figure from a novel by P. C. Wren or an operetta by Sigmund Romberg.

  As though it were yesterday, she remembered their first meeting nearly ten years ago when she had gone to his Dubai office trying to get aboard Richard’s ship, the first Prometheus. How well she remembered the steely glare of his pale, Scottish eyes, the twining of his fingers in his red Rob Roy beard. And the cold disdain with which he raised that eagle beak of a nose and thinned those perfectly sculpted desert prince’s lips. On first meeting they had fought like cat and dog. They had been the best of friends ever since.

  Angus’s mother had been a Scottish nanny flown out to Dubai to tend the royal offspring, but one of the Sheikh’s cousins had married her instead. It had been a strange match but a successful one. Angus had attended Fettes College in Edinburgh and there he had first met Richard and there the two had started their own friendship. Now Angus kept offices in Dubai, on Za’abil Street, near Sheikh Ahmad’s palace overlooking the Creek; and in Manama City, Bahrain, on Old Palace Road near the Soukh. He had set them up first as an agent for Crewfinders, the first company Richard had ever founded, but now he maintained them as Heritage Mariner’s agent as well.

  Just as Angus had been the first to contact them with the news, so he was the first they had contacted when starting to form their plan.

  “Richard! At last! Yes, I hear you five by five. I was growing concerned, old friend. I thought you had been taken, too. Only your radio! Well that is good news at least.” How well Robin remembered that first transmission as they neared the Gulf at last.

  “No, there is no more news from here. I have messages for you from all over the world, but no real news at all. Helen Dufour and Sir Justin Bulwer-Lyons have raised nothing other than sympathy from the Foreign Office in London. Eric Ellen’s people at the International Maritime Bureau may have more, I expect to be hearing from them again soon. Chris and C. J. Martyr in New York pass on messages from Bob Stark’s father: nothing doing in Washington either. They’re all too nervous of the situation in Iran. Apparently, the Navy and the Air Force are at each other’s throats there. It’s a powder keg.”

  “All right, Angus,” Richard’s clipped tones echoed in Robin’s memory, bringing an unconscious stirring of lust to her heavily-wrapped body, which was beginning to behave a little oddly now, gripped by the hormones of early pregnancy. Nine weeks down, thirty-three to full term. “Here’s what I want you to do. First, I want you up in Bahrain—we’ll coordinate from there. It’s nearer Prometheus and more open. It has the international airport at Muharraq.

  “Then get Martyr. He can leave Chris to run the New York office and…”

  “Martyr’s already moving, Richard.” Angus’s calm pronouncement still made the short hairs on Robin’s neck stir. Ten years before, the events on the first Prometheus had made a friendship between these people more like that of a combat unit than of business associates. They still held a reunion dinner every year. They called it “Separation Day” to commemorate the night their ship had broken in two. Richard, Robin, Sir William, C. J. Martyr, John Higgins, Twelve Toes Ho, Kerem Khalil; all who had been aboard that night and lived to tell the tale. At first, also, Salah Malik, the great silent Palestinian ex-PLO man who had been chief petty officer on that fateful night had attended, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. But of later years, Salah had effectively vanished, returning to the continuing tragedy of his beloved Beirut, impossible to contact any longer.

  Of all of them, Salah was the one they most needed now. Perhaps he even knew the men holding her father and her ship. The realization seemed to hit her like a blow in the stomach. Her thoughts grew murderous…

  She jerked her mind back from that dangerous path and returned them to yesterday, to that moment when Angus had told them Martyr was moving.

  Of course he was. They all would be. Richard didn’t even need to contact them. They would know. From all over the world they would come like the crew of a fishing village’s lifeboat when the alarm sounds, leaving their families, their work, their lives. All they had to know was where Richard and Robin were heading for and somehow they would be there. Except for the man they needed most.

  Except for Salah.

  Her thoughts now full circle, she shook her head and brought her mind right back to the present. Richard still stood at the helm, though with Katapult slicing steadily across the wind on automatic setting he was there only to take evasive action should Robin spot anything. The other two were below, going about some business of their own.

  And now they were just coming under the shadow of Fate. The massive oil platform, Fa’at to the Arabs but Fate to Westerners, rose out of the choppy sea on four great rusted legs like some ancient iron monster. Like some latter-day Colossus of Rhodes, she thought, striving to straddle Hormuz as the original had straddled Rhodes Harbor. It was an anachronism, out of place; deserted, unused, mysterious. It looked as though it had been built for the North Sea with a high platform raised further by cliffs of deserted prefabs clustered around its central derricks. The other platforms that studded this sea were flimsy by comparison, relying on small waves and tideless waters. But Fate was different. Alien. Almost eerie.

  Who had put it there, when or why, Robin had no idea. Why they had abandoned it and left it deserted to rot like the Marie Celeste or the Flying Dutchman at anchor, she had never been able to discover. Yet there it stood, four strong legs rising out of that shallow sea, each one a hundred feet in circumference. Fifty feet high to the first level, a hundred to the flat tops of its buildings. Perhaps an acre in area, packed with emptiness, ruin, and despair. She had never been up there and knew of no one who had, but the atmosphere of the thing reached this far with ease. It was avoided alike by the small craft running south of it, hugging the coast superstitiously, by Abu Dhabi and Dubai; and by the tankers running north pushing the deep-water lanes dangerously close to the Iranian naval stations on Jezireh ye Qushm, ten scant miles beyond.

  A sharp double click jerked her mind back aboard. While she had been daydreaming about Fate, Weary and Hood’s mysterious industry had moved from the cabin to the afterdeck. They had opened the lazarette and brought out both the box she had rescued from the burning ship and the other one, marked with a big X, they had also pulled up on the end of Richard’s line from the explosives dumping ground last night. And, surrounded by plastic-wrapped thunderflash grenades, they were stripping and checking the Kalashnikhovs.

  Chapter Eight

  Richard lay at his ease on Katapult’s foredeck while the multihull lay safely at anchor. He was luxuriating in the illusory coolness of night while Weary worked below. Darkness was really little cooler than daylight here, but at least it allowed the freedom of partial nudity. Like Robin, he had spent each day since they had passed the Quoins and entered the Gulf wearing far too much clothing as protection from the sun. Now he lay on the cooling foredeck wearing only a pair
of swimming trunks and perspiring freely. He remembered Noel Mostert’s description of darkness in this place, “Like sitting in the heat of a black sun.” Damn right, he thought. Sleep would have been out of the question, even had he not been waiting.

  Katapult had arrived in Manama and anchored at sunset. Robin and Hood had gone straight ashore, leaving Weary and Richard anchored out here, far enough away from the harbor itself to be fairly sure that the Bahraini customs would not ask what they were carrying. Bahrain remained a favorite landfall of his but he was well aware that not even that island state’s courteous authorities were likely to overlook six fully loaded Kalashnikhovs, several thousand rounds of ammunition, and four dozen thunderflash grenades.

  So Robin had gone ashore like any innocent tourist to take a shower and collect Angus El Kebir. Hood had gone to report officially about Katapult’s part in the explosion of that mysterious, nameless, burning ship and to turn over the radio and the copy of the Koran they had found aboard her. And to see what gossip could be collected in the port and in the Soukh. Not much, Richard guessed, and nothing at all that Angus would have missed.

  So now he waited, watching the night around him and taking what he suspected would be his last welcome rest until this thing was over.

  Katapult’s “eyes” looked north, and so did Richard’s across the width of the Gulf toward Bushehr on the coast of Iran. Toward his pirated Prometheus, if Admiral Stark was correct. It was full night—had been so since half an hour after sunset—but it was not really dark. Before him lay uncounted oil rigs, as numerous, almost, as seaborne stars; each rig with its bright gas flare belching sooty yellow flames, each fiery flower indistinguishable from its reflection in the glassy surface beneath. In series, giving a kind of depth to the night, the flat galaxy of them spread away before him, flickering and dancing one and all, though moved by what forces Heaven alone knew. Certainly not by wind.

  Above them, some real stars lay strewn across the sky, pallid in comparison. These were brightest overhead but faded into the distance until they were lost in cloud. For over Bushehr—above Prometheus herself perhaps—there was a thunderstorm. He could see the electrical power of it: flashes of brightness so dazzling in their intensity as to make him wince, even at this distance. The occasional discrete blue-white bolt arcing downward, burning itself into his retinas for seconds afterward. It was stunningly impressive—and the more so for being silent. There were few night sounds around him in any case. No wind, not even enough to hum in Katapult’s rigging. No sound of humanity, for he was too far out to catch any bustle from the bright glow of Manama. There were no other boats near at hand. No rigs. Nothing. Apart from the slapping of wavelets on her hull, and an occasional unfathomable sea sound, Katapult lay at the heart of a total silence into which crept occasionally only the faintest echo of a hint of a whisper of distant thunder, so quiet it might almost be a dream.

  Richard knew these desert storms of old. Spectacular pyrotechnics, mind-numbing cacophony if one was close by. And, strangely, no rain at all. Dry desert winds whirling damper cloud-bearing air to colossal heights, begetting the most stunning of tempests, and yet, no matter how heavily those clouds poured, every drop would have evaporated hundreds of feet from the parched ground. Just another little joke of the desert.

  But the quiet and the solitude gave him time to think of more than climatology. The relative inaction of the last few days had weighed more heavily on him than even Robin suspected. Katapult had begun to seem like a trap; the failure of the radio was the last straw. He was far too sensible to blame himself for any of this—though Robin, he knew, her moods made strange by her pregnancy, was suffering pangs of survivor guilt. It was nothing more than coincidence that all this had happened while they were so far away from base, so completely out of touch. Or seemed to be nothing more at the moment. He regretted poignantly that he was not at the center of things in London. But then again, for all that he had been a passenger so far rather than a prime mover, he felt he was nearer the heart of things here where he was now. Certainly, if he had been in London, he would have been bound with red tape. Doing more, but achieving nothing. Never in his wildest dreams, if he had been at home when it all blew up, would he ever have considered what he was planning now. Buccaneering across the Gulf armed to the teeth with illicit Russian guns and thunderflash grenades.

  Suddenly there was a thump on the deck beside his head. He sat up, swinging round to see what was going on. Weary was standing behind him, by the mast. Richard looked down. Lying on the deck close at hand was one of the black disks he had just been thinking about.

  “Don’t know what made me think of it,” Weary’s tone was conversational. He might have been talking about the weather. “Because they’d all dried off, I guess. When we were packing them away I thought I’d better try one. Can’t take anything for granted. And now seems as good a time as any.”

  “Of course. Good idea. We’re far enough out. Try one now.”

  Weary nodded. “Fact is, I have tried one, Richard. I’ve tried several. Brought this one up for you to try.”

  Richard knew then, at once, and he actually gasped with shock. But he picked up the heavy little disk anyway, twisted the top, and threw it into the sea, counting to three as he did so. The water closed over it, and he recognized the mysterious sea-sound he had been listening to just now.

  And nothing else happened. No explosion. Nothing.

  Like two out of the three he had fired at the eel.

  “Looks like it was a mixed batch you found,” said Weary. “Some disarmed. Some not. We pulled up the wrong box. Bad luck.”

  “Okay,” said Richard quietly. He tried always to meet crisis with calm. “First, let’s see if there’s any way we can check the rest without detonating any live ones. Then we’ll have a think.”

  They went through the boxful in silence. It soon became obvious that each grenade, like the box they came in, had been marked with the letter X. And, it seemed, X meant they had all been disarmed. They were all useless.

  They heard the buzz of the inflatable some time before it came alongside and so they had time to dress in flannels and shirts, and to be waiting silently on deck for the others to arrive. Hood jumped aboard cheerfully. Robin climbed up in a cloud of silk and soap, and Richard at once felt grimy as well as frustrated. What luck! he seethed silently. Angus boomed aboard sparking with energy and all thoughts other than those of action were driven from Richard’s head. After the briefest of pleasantries, they retired below to plan their next few moves in detail.

  Richard chaired the meeting automatically, as a matter of course. “What we need,” he said as soon as they were all seated, “is a careful plan of campaign. Angus, you’ve been at the center of things so far, what’ve you arranged?”

  “You want contacts made, action taken, or events expected?” asked Angus calmly, as though this were some humdrum board meeting and not a council of war.

  “Start with events expected.”

  “Okay. First, Martyr flies in from New York later tonight. He should arrive at Muharraq in two and a half hours’ time.”

  “We’ll meet him,” decided Richard.

  “I tried to contact Salah Malik but with no success at all. He may even be dead for all we know. Beirut…”

  “Yes,” said Richard, a little too quickly, his eyes on Robin. “But we can keep trying. What about news?”

  “Still nothing. It’s incredible, I know, but there has still been no word from anyone about either situation. We can’t even be certain that they are connected. But we’ve been working on the assumption that they are…”

  Richard’s eyes stayed on Robin as Angus detailed the conclusions he had reached with the help of Helen Dufour, Heritage Mariner, the International Maritime Bureau, and all their worldwide contacts. The same conclusions Richard and Robin had arrived at alone.

  She sat, pale, tired, yet completely intrepid. The shower had gone some way toward restoring her but what seemed to be making the mos
t difference was the white robe she had bought this evening in Manama. It was silken and flowing, covering her from neck to ankle—and so, obviously, perfect protection from the sun—but so light as to give an overwhelming impression of coolness. She had also bought a little hand-carved wooden fan and, as she waved it gently by her left cheek, she filled the whole cabin with the scent of sandalwood.

  “Right,” he snapped again as Angus completed his report. “Action taken. This one’s mine, I think; have you taken any specific action I don’t know about, Angus?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. What we have is this. Thanks to the U.S. Navy, we have the communications system we need to mount a concerted attack on Prometheus. We have the transport we need. Armaments…” He broke off. Leave the useless grenades out of the calculations for the moment, he decided. “We have two trained soldiers: Sam and Weary here. Then we have me. Robin. You, Angus, and finally Martyr, when he arrives. I don’t envision us all going aboard, however. We need a backup system as well as a strike force, remember.”

  “So, do we go in blind?” Angus leaned forward, part of the plan unhesitatingly.

  “Not if I can help it. Fast, yes. Blind, no. I need to know exactly where Prometheus is. Admiral Stark has helped there, but his information is several days old. I need an update. Ideally we need to know how many terrorists are aboard and where they are likely to be…”

  “We can surmise a lot of that information,” chimed in Robin. “There are places where they would have to be…”

  “That’s right,” said Richard. “And we could do with knowing what they have done with the crew. Are they just locked in their cabins or are they all together in some central location…”

  “Depends on how many terrorists there are,” opined Robin. “They need men on the bridge. In the engine control room if they want to use the generators. They need patrols. Lookouts. If there are as few as, say, a dozen, the crew would have to be locked in some central location. They’d need more than twenty to police the cabins efficiently for any length of time.”