by Peter Tonkin
Bridge-deck corridor. Left. Right. Empty. Silent. Doors ajar. Bridge door opposite. All along the rear of the bridge, windows onto this corridor. At each end of those windows, doors out onto the bridge and bridgewings. Ajar. Not a movement. Not a whisper.
Weary at his shoulder. One meaningful glance. Weary nodded: understood. Off they went, one each way. Pause at the bridge door looking in. Instruments, chart table, nothing more. Whisper of sound. Stirring of air. Weary gone out onto the starboard bridge-wing. Count of three.
“Three!” said Richard to himself as he rolled in. The room was empty. He stood up. Weary came in off the starboard bridge-wing and they both ran left, guns at the ready. But the port bridge-wing was empty, too.
Weary put the radio to his mouth. “Bridge empty,” he whispered, and waited.
Richard stood behind him, eyes slitted against the glare of the sun reflecting off the water, looking down the whole length of Prometheus’s deck to that irregular white patch made by Katapult’s spinnaker on the forecastle head. Not a stir of motion. Not a flicker. Nothing.
And yet…
“Engine room empty,” whispered Martyr’s voice from Weary’s radio.
Richard slapped him on the shoulder and gestured with his thumb: going down. They moved off like a ghost and a shadow.
They used the same routine going down they had employed coming up. At the A deck level they deviated, plunging back into the rear sections of the bridge, silently exploring the warren of corridors that led back to the recreation areas overlooking the afterdeck with its swimming pool and helipad. Where the gymnasium was.
The gym was constructed so as to extend the rear of the bridge-house into a balcony looking aft. It had four doors. Two opened down onto the afterdeck by the pool. And the helipad where Prometheus’s little Westland Wasp was anchored. Two opened in from the bridge corridor. All of these doors had glass pannels in the top. So that Martyr and Malik coming in from the deck knew a second after Richard and Weary that it was empty. The four of them stood facing each other in the deserted room, looking about silently. The big room showed every evidence of recent occupation. There was bedding on the floor. There were tables and chairs. The ship’s televisions had been moved in here, each with its video player below. But there were no people. Richard looked up, vividly recalling the sound of automatic fire that had echoed behind his last departure from the ship. Sure enough, the panels of the suspended ceiling were splintered, scored, and pocked with bullet holes. But no other damage had been done.
They paused in the gym until Richard had finished that first, rapid inspection, then he led them to somewhere less exposed for a conference. Close to the gym was the doctor’s surgery. Unlike the exercise area, it had no windows. One thick-glassed porthole was the only way of seeing in or out, and the door was solid. Here they grouped, gulping in great lungfuls of air, stilling muscles all quivering with tension, whispering a conversation between ragged gasps. Three of them stood in the middle of the room while Weary stood guard at the door.
“Empty!” said Richard first. “Abandoned! Did you see any sign of life?”
“Not a thing. Not a soul.” Martyr shook his head in wonderment. Then he flicked the SEND button on his radio. “No one aboard, Chris. She’s deserted.”
“Where are they all?” Salah looked almost spooked. “There ought to be fifty-two people aboard. But not a whisper. Not a sign.”
“Not quite,” said Weary quietly. “There’s someone here all right. Or has been, recently.” He slid downward, his back against the doorframe, eyes busy through the inch he had left open. He put his left hand on the floor palm down, then lifted it like an American Indian saying “How.”
It was covered in blood. Liquid. Oozing. Fresh.
Chapter Seventeen
“No one aboard,” said Chris in wonderment. “All that performance on the afterdeck to an empty theater.” She laughed ruefully and rose, flicking the radio to OFF. She stretched and Robin eyed her lithe form enviously.
“I think I’ll go up and join them. You want to come, Robin?”
“D’you think I could get up that chain with my allday morning sickness?” Robin sounded uncharacteristically low since her earlier fright.
“Sure you could,” said Chris bracingly. “The men got themselves up there so it has to be a cinch. Tie her up tight and let’s go. You know if we stay down here we’ll just get bitched at for not having put the spinnaker away.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You know I am.”
It only took them a moment to dress—shirts and jeans over bikinis, and docksiders on bare feet. They made Katapult fast to one massive link, then climbed onto the chain itself.
Like the men, half an hour earlier, they arrived on the forecastle head under the light awning of the spinnaker. But, unlike the men, they saw no need to use it for cover. And no need at all to go creeping among pipes when there was a catwalk convenient to their feet. “It is odd, though,” Chris was saying as they started along the narrow path above the pipes. “Where could they all have gone?”
“I don’t know.” Robin was actually deeply concerned. She had wanted so desperately to find her father here among her kidnapped friends and to release them all together. But finding no one only deepened the mystery and renewed the pain. And put them back in that position of being helpless bystanders. She hated that. Then, half ruefully, she admitted to herself that in this case it was simply impossible to please her, for, while she hated inactivity, she had found the action so far not at all to her taste because it had put either her husband or her unborn child at risk.
As she and Chris strolled along, fifteen feet above the deck, her mind was preoccupied but her eyes were automatically busy. She was a fully qualified ship’s captain after all, and part owner of everything she surveyed. All at once she called to Christine, “Look. The accommodation ladder’s down.”
The ladder was halfway along the ship on the starboard side, just opposite the midway set of steps leading down from the catwalk to the deck. Both Chris and Robin ran easily down these at once and set out across the expanse of green deck toward the ladder’s head. Down here, the heat was intensified, reflecting back up off the deck, which was soon singeing even Robin’s callused feet through the thin soles of her lightweight footwear. They ran across as fast as they could, therefore, and stood looking bemusedly down. The steps were almost at full extension, falling to within five feet of the water. They stirred slightly in the steady south wind and banged dully on Prometheus’s side. “This is odd, too,” said Robin. “All of it is bloody odd.”
She turned, absently running her fingers through her golden curls. And her eyes lit on something else odd.
Just inboard from the top of the ladder was a hatch. It was a low inspection hatch that consisted of a simple trapdoor, hinged and clipped, on a raised rim some eighteen inches high. It led down to a system of tunnels that wove around and between the tanks so they could be inspected from without as well as within.
The hatch cover should have been secured by two quick release clips at all times. The clips on this one were open. Her mind still preoccupied with the mystery of the accommodation ladder, she crossed to this and automatically stooped to snap the catch closed. Then she saw the stains on the deck. Crouching carefully, too wise to think of kneeling, she drifted the tips of her fingers over the brown mark nearest to the hatch itself. They came away sticky. She put them fastidiously to her nose. Even granted that it came from an iron deck, there was no mistaking the iron smell of the sticky stuff on her fingers.
She straightened at once, looking around narroweyed. Chris was still staring down at the ladder, unaware of this new development. Oblivious of the sudden purposefulness of her friend’s movements. With her right foot, Robin snapped the nearest quick-release down. “Chris,” she called quietly. “Let’s go. Now!”
At first, Chris failed to understand the reason they ran down the remainder of the deck but the instant they were in the A deck
corridor, Richard came pounding down the stairs, MP-5 at the ready, and Robin supplied the explanation.
“I don’t know who it is,” said Robin as her eyes met Richard’s, “but there’s someone down in the midships inspection area. Someone bleeding pretty badly.”
“Okay,” snapped Richard ten minutes later, “unclip it.”
Weary’s toe moved upward infinitesimally and the clip sprang open. The two men stood tensely, awaiting developments.
Nothing happened.
Weary sidled round to the hinge side of the raised cover and, holding his Kalashnikhov upright on his right hip, he leaned across the metal disk and took its handle from behind. Then he straightened slowly, bringing the cover up to protect his body like a heavy iron shield.
On the far side of the deck, Salah had just done the same thing. Richard put his radio to his lips. “Going in.”
“Going in,” said Martyr in a hiss of static.
Both men carried radios, MP-5 machine pistols, and torches. No thunderflashes. Not down here. The guns were more for effect than anything else. To rupture a tank even with a single bullet would probably be to detonate the ship.
At Richard’s feet, an iron-runged ladder led down into a tunnel dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs heavily protected. Nothing that could ignite stray pockets of gas was allowed down here. Even the leads between the lights were specially sheathed. Richard checked the gun’s safety, then let it hang from his shoulder. He let the radio hang from one wrist and the rubberized torch from the other. They would slide from elbow to wrist depending on what he was doing.
He glanced across the deck one last time, then down he went. As soon as he stepped onto the ladder, Weary was there above him, Kalashnikhov pointing down. Unlike the exploration of the bridge-house, this was a job for one man on each side. One man who knew the tunnels well.
Richard stepped down off the ladder into the first dim gallery and turned, holding his breath. No sound. He allowed the torch to slide down his right wrist and slap into his hand. He flicked it on without moving his feet and shone it on the iron-grating floor. At first nothing. He flashed it farther afield. And there it was, like Ariadne’s thread in the Labyrinth: a bright drop of blood. He put his radio to his lips. “Level one, corridor A,” he breathed. “Going aft. Blood.”
He moved off at once, torch beam on the floor, looking for more blood. Whoever was in here now must have been in the surgery when they boarded. The fugitive had been disturbed by their arrival and fled to this bizarre hiding place. If he realized he had left a trail of blood, then he could use it as a trap. If he wished to attack instead of hiding. If he had the strength after losing all this blood.
“Don’t try to imagine who it might be,” Weary had warned them. “You want it to be one of your people hiding from terrorists. Fine. It might be. Or it might be a terrorist wounded and hiding out himself. Look, Richard, we don’t know what’s gone on here. For all we know, the SAS could have come aboard while we were off Zarakkuh and sorted it out like they did the Iranian Embassy in London.”
“SBS more likely, but I see what you mean.”
“Right. We’ll all have time to think this through properly later. But for now, just see what happens and react accordingly. Fast. Remember: no presuppositions. They’ll get you killed every time.”
Another drop of blood. He went on down the tunnel, every nerve tense. As he proceeded, a memory began to stir. There was something down here. On this level. Something slightly unusual. Hardly worthy of note and yet he had remarked upon it once. What? When? Good God, yes. There was a little room down here. One of those tiny pieces of fun the occasional marine architect likes to add to a design. A useful little store place among all this maze of tunnels for the equipment one might need down here. Just the sort of place to keep all the sorts of things you were liable to leave on deck or up in the bridge-house by accident. By God, there was a room down here.
That’s where he was.
“And don’t be fooled into thinking there’s only one of them either,” Weary insisted in his memory, rehearsing the things his combat sergeant had told him out in Vietnam. “There’s only one wounded by the looks of things, but maybe he’s got a friend.”
“C. J.,” whispered Richard into his radio, “I think I know where they are.”
Five minutes later they converged from either end of that long, midships tunnel to the head of the ladder going down. Silently, and without the aid of their torches, they looked down into that secret little room. They could see and hear nothing. Except, when Richard knelt and slid his finger along the top rung, there was the telltale sticky wetness of the track he had been following. That was it. Here they were.
No way out for their quarry.
No way in for them except down that ladder.
Richard held up his fingers, just visible in the dim, yellow light. THREE…TWO…ONE…
Both torches blazed their powerful beams down into the darkness. The stub barrels of the machine pistols clashed against the ladder.
“All right,” called Richard. “We have you covered. Come out with your hands up!”
“Is that you, Richard?” replied a woman’s voice, hoarse with fatigue but rich and familiar. “Thank God! I thought you were those bloody terrorists coming back!”
And out into the pool of light stepped Asha Quartermaine, supporting the fainting, blood-drenched figure of Captain John Higgins.
“Help me get him back up to the surgery, would you? If I don’t stitch him up again soon, he’s going to bleed to death.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Gulf. Off Kharg Island. 08:15 hrs. Local Time.
As the body of First Officer Cecil Smyke collapsed onto the deck, Captain John Higgins strode forward, totally overcome by rage. The moment he moved, there was a series of sharp clicks as the terrorists across his deck cocked their weapons, and a hoarse, icy voice called out in English, “It won’t be you, Captain. It will be your crew, one by one, like the lieutenant.”
John froze at the threat, looking suspiciously around. Which of the anonymous figures had spoken? It was impossible to tell.
“What do you want here?” John demanded.
“At the moment, nothing more than your cooperation. Order your crew below, please. They seem reluctant to move without your permission.”
“Where below?”
“The ship’s gymnasium, please. All of them. Now!” The final word rang out like the crack of a whip. John was about to tell him to drop dead, but a sense of his own ultimate responsibility overcame his hot head. Whoever these people were, they had not boarded without a plan. They knew what they were doing and were ruthlessly willing to enforce their orders. The death of Smyke proved that. “Very well,” he said quietly. “All of you, please go below at the direction of these gentlemen.”
In the gymnasium, they were at once split into work parties. One began to empty the big room of its sporting equipment. Another brought in bedding. A third carried in tables and chairs. Throughout this bustle, John, Asha Quartermaine, and Bob Stark stood restively under the guns of two men assigned to watch them alone. Both the captain and his American chief engineer were active, dominant men and they reacted to this situation uneasily. They were not alone in this. Asha was pale with outrage and every line of her, from deep red hair to ill-laced shoes, loudly signaled her defiance. Among the crew, Chief Petty Officer Kerem Khalil and Chief Steward Twelve Toes Ho both moved with surly obedience, looking to the senior officers for confirmation before obeying any orders. The atmosphere was tense. Dangerous.
But at last the tasks were completed to the satisfaction of the anonymous terrorist leader. “Sit down,” he snapped. They sat. The terrorists ranged themselves shoulder to shoulder across the room. There were eight of them here, though John suspected there would be more in strategic positions elsewhere about the ship. They all looked similar—in many ways identical. They were all wiry men, thin but strong looking. From the way they moved, they seemed fit. Battle trained. They all w
ore the same uniform—camouflage fatigues and checked kaffiyah headdresses. The kaffiyahs were folded across their faces so that only their eyes were visible. The skin color on their hands varied slightly, but they all had fierce dark eyes.
Standing all together like that, with seven of them silent, it soon became obvious which one of them was speaking. He could not quite disguise the movements of his lips and jaw behind his kaffiyah. He could not control the tiny gestures of his hands. And the instant he gave himself away he became their target. Unnumbered eyes within the room searched that speaker’s body for any sign that would single him out for special attention later.
At first sight, there was nothing to distinguish him from the others apart from the fact that he spoke English with an English accent in a hoarse, broken voice, but eventually Asha’s quick, trained eye noticed a thin scar that writhed across the back of his left hand to disappear under his sleeve, and so, even as he threatened them he was marked.
“You will all spend most of your time in here for the next few days. There will be at least two guards here with you at all times. If you fail to obey them they will shoot. If you even so much as threaten them, they will shoot. I have no doubt that forty intrepid men and women could overcome two guards, even if they are armed with automatic weapons, so remember this: beyond the doors will be more guards and beyond them, more still. If you try to escape you will all die like your first officer.
“Now, as to the next few days, the routine is simple. You will remain in here. You may sleep, sit, or walk about. But you may not talk. Anyone who talks will be locked in one of the cabins and will receive no food or water for two days. In this heat, they will suffer greatly, I promise you. You all will, in fact, for to make this punishment effective I will be forced to switch off the ship’s air-conditioning. You will be taken out to the ship’s toilet facilities in small groups twice a day. You will be fed twice a day. Teams of cooks and stewards will prepare food, serve, and clear away under our direction. That is all you need to know.”