The Fire Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “Now look here,” John began.

  “Captain Higgins,” said the terrorist leader, crossing to him on swift, silent feet, “I just knew the first one would be you!” and he hit him with his rifle butt on the side of the head.

  John came to in the ship’s surgery with Asha by his side. “You did that on purpose,” she whispered.

  “Well, I’m no use cooped up in there.”

  “Not so loud! There’s a guard outside the door.”

  “Where do you think they’ll put me?”

  “Don’t count on them putting you anywhere. As we were carrying you out of the gym I heard him say that you got one chance—they got none.”

  “Damn! Well, we’ll just have to see what happens next, I suppose. Ouch! That stings.”

  “Iodine. When you’ve got a plan worked out, let me know.”

  “You’ll be part of any plan.”

  “Yes, but I won’t be in there with you. They’re moving me out. Keeping me apart.”

  “That’s nasty.”

  “Logical. I’m the only woman.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  The door slammed open and the two of them whirled guiltily. One of the terrorists stood frozen in the doorway. Something in the room seemed to have come as a great shock. The gun dangled in limp hands. The kaffiyah mask moved from side to side as the terrorist’s head shook. Both John and Asha tensed, sensing a chance. But they were too slow. The gun snapped up again to point unwaveringly at the captain. Then the barrel gestured: move.

  Back in the silent gym, John considered that last terrorist. A slighter figure than the rest. A different way of walking. A woman? He filed the thought away for future consideration.

  During the days that followed, beneath the stultifying boredom of the routine a kind of war was fought. It was the type of war a class of schoolboys might declare on a hated teacher—but it was no less serious or deadly for being so. In the enforced silence, observed to break down communication, communication flourished. Notes were passed until all paper and writing implements were confiscated. Sign language developed. Codes. And every message successfully passed bolstered the crew’s morale and undermined the guards’ authority. These games centered around John and Bob Stark. There was no situation that these two could not turn to some subversive advantage, to the delight of their men and the discomfiture of their captors. They became past masters in the art of dumb insolence. They time-wasted in a thousand ways. They became stupid, clumsy, disruptive.

  As time passed, the campaign had its effect beyond questions of morale. The guards became tired, snappish, dangerous. As the endless days dragged by, a tense situation was escalated toward the explosive. And all the pressure settled upon the head of one man. The man responsible for the whole situation. The leader of the terrorists.

  They singled him out for special attention. They never missed an opportunity to challenge his authority or undermine his power. They gestured silently behind his back. They reacted more slowly to his orders. They were more stupid, clumsy, childish when he was around. They exercised their ingenuity to the utmost trying to destroy him in ways that would not cause him to destroy them first. And, indeed, as four days passed, then five, the strain on him did seem to be intensifying beyond bearing. Almost as if he were waiting for something. Something that should have happened some time ago, but had not.

  That was another objective of their endless communication games—speculation. Who were these people? What did they want? How could they be defeated? The regimen they imposed made anything other than guesswork extremely difficult, but in those early days speculation was rife. John and Bob collected it, sifted it, and filed it. Both of them knew with increasing certainty that the only way to get hard facts was to run the risk again that John had taken at once—to get thrown out. Only outside the gym was there a real chance to gather solid information. Only out there, in the little Westland helicopter, was there any real chance for escape. But the Westland had no fuel aboard, and only Bob knew how to fly it.

  Kerem Khalil and Twelve Toes Ho became part of the central committee too, for they could begin to supply some information about what was going on outside. Their men were doing the cooking, cleaning, and other odd jobs required by the terrorists. Anyone who went out of the gym for whatever reason was thoroughly grilled on his return. Were there guards outside? How many? Had they seen one set relieve another or were they all on duty all the time? Where were the terrorists sleeping? Eating? Keeping watches? Even visits to the latrine became like sorties into enemy territory.

  Life for Asha Quartermaine was very different. She was given much more freedom to move around the bridgehouse from her quarters, to her surgery, to the library. Whereas the others filled their days with their games to ward off that terrifying boredom, she caught up with her reading and plotted alone.

  She saw no one from the crew at all after that first tending of John’s bruised skull. When the stewards were preparing or serving food she was kept well away. Her own meals were always brought by the slightest of the terrorists—the one she suspected of being a woman—and eaten alone. She had her own small shower and toilet in her quarters so she never needed to use the crew’s. When the crew went to the toilet or the showers she was again kept clear so that not even the most intricate planning on her part could bring about an apparently accidental meeting with John or Bob. She began to feel more than lonely—she began to feel distanced. Deserted. No matter what John had said about including her in any plans they made, she began to feel that they had abandoned her.

  And so she worked on her own plans.

  Her whole reason for being here, the outcome of nearly a year’s work and planning, was to contact her twin sister. She was the elder by a matter of minutes, but that fact colored her relationship with Fatima. Asha was the maternal, paternal, strongly protective half. The reliable one. The caring one. The doctor. Fatima had been wild, mischievous, adventurous. The romantic. The political activist. The reporter. The thought of her Fatima, trapped in a foreign society, that brave soul of freedom caged by the whim of a born-again Muslim father, was more than Asha could stand. She blamed herself for allowing Fatima to go to his bedside. She tortured herself with the thought of what it must be like for the flamboyant feminist to be held in the most repressive of conditions. Alone and friendless after her divorce from Giles Quartermaine, she had become almost morbidly worried about Fatima. And then the first letter had arrived. Posted during her flight through Dahran immediately after her escape from their father’s house, it told of Fatima’s life there and how she was now free.

  That first letter had begun the transformation of Asha’s life. For a start, it had emphasized how much had already changed since Fatima had been taken away—her young sister had no idea she was now divorced from Giles Quartermaine. Indeed, part of that turbulent missive proposed that Asha should get Giles to run a series of programs for Western television about the terrible injustice of forcing liberated women into conditions she described as medieval servitude.

  Giles Quartermaine, in fact, featured largely in Fatima’s early proposals, for that first letter was followed by others. The tenor of the letters changed as time went by, and Asha came to suspect the truth: that Fatima’s offers of journalistic contacts within various terrorist cadres actually included Fatima herself. Asha’s divorce from Giles Quartermaine had been reported quite widely, but nowhere Fatima could read about it, and the reason for her ignorance became disturbingly clear: freedom fighters such as she had become no longer read Western gossip columns. So her little sister continued to refer to her ex-husband, relying on him to guarantee her worldwide publicity as soon as she required it.

  The letters did not arrive regularly or often. There were by no means many of them tucked in Asha’s writing case in her cabin, but there were quite enough to give the elder sister a firm idea of her twin’s rough whereabouts. With nothing to lose, therefore, Asha had handed in her notice at the small hosp
ital she had been working in since the divorce and started to plan how she could get to the Middle East—preferably the Gulf—to look for Fatima. Becoming a ship’s doctor aboard tankers filling at Kharg Island gave her just what she needed—a feeling of being close to Fatima and a steady job into the bargain. She would probably have drifted onto Heritage Mariner’s ships eventually in any case—after BP they were the largest British tanker fleet—but for some reason she could never quite fathom, they featured once or twice by name in Fatima’s letters. She came onto their fleet on purpose, therefore, and found the friendly atmosphere aboard was very much to her taste. And so, amid the companionship so sorely lacking in her life since the double blow of the kidnap and the divorce, she began to let time slip by.

  Then the last letter arrived: the one that had brought her here. It was another one for Giles, really, though addressed to her at their old home and forwarded, like the others, by her bank. In it, Fatima offered her dazzling brother-in-law the veiled promise of a scoop. All he had to do, she hinted, was to keep an eye on the Gulf in general and on Heritage Mariner’s flagship in particular. At first, Asha thought of handing the letter to the authorities or even to Richard Mariner himself—but in the end either action seemed too much like a betrayal of Fatima. So she simply folded it up, put it with the rest, and contacted the ship’s doctor on Prometheus. Would he mind swapping berths for a trip or two? Of course not. And so it had been done. Her motivation was as uncomplicated as it had been since she had lost Fatima: to get her little sister back again. Or to see her—perhaps talk to her—at the very least. She had been almost relieved to come out of the hold behind John Higgins and find the deck crowded with terrorists.

  The excitement died the moment she saw Cecil Smyke. It was replaced with a sort of dull horror she had been at great pains to disguise from the others, indulging it only after her separation from them when she was alone. But she was not the sort of woman to give in to weakness and she soon began to use her rela- tive liberty to put together a cache of the sort of equipment she would need if and when she tried to make her escape.

  At last, the only thing keeping her here was the certainty that she had not been mistaken in her first hopes: Fatima was on Prometheus somewhere. But how could Fatima have been party to the murder of Cecil Smyke? And why hadn’t she made some sort of contact?

  The fifth night of captivity was literally hellish. The air outside the bridge was so horrifically stultifying that even in the coolness of the air-conditioned rooms, something of that fierce Gulf heat intruded. Certainly the thunderous atmosphere in the dark air above caused fractiousness, short tempers, and colossal headaches in everyone aboard. Asha was prone to atmospheric migraines and fought this one by standing under a shower set exactly at blood heat for the better part of an hour. At about seven she emerged, cool enough to feel a slight chill from the air-conditioning, and consequently she caught up a towel to wrap around herself even though she knew she would regret it later when she became too hot to sleep. The action was providential because otherwise she would have been naked when she walked into her cabin and found the terrorist leader there.

  She froze, thunderstruck by his presence here. Automatically she opened her mouth to scream. But the instant she did so, the window behind his shoulder was filled with an explosion of lightning like Armageddon and the immediate havoc of thunder was like Judgment Day. The deafening pyrotechnics of the storm gave them pause and some semblance of calm had returned to the situation before communication became possible. He made no move toward her as the thunder rolled on and on, so she walked past him to her wardrobe and put on a long silk dressing gown.

  As she did so, a second claw of lightning pounced down toward the desert. This time the thunder was, if anything, louder. She kicked her bare feet into open sandals and, sweeping her hair back over one broad shoulder, she confronted him again.

  “Is this a social call?” she demanded as the echoes rumbled into silence. And their eyes locked. Hers beneath imperious brows, tawny; his deep-shadowed under the folds of his kaffiyah, dark brown, almost black. Not quite sane.

  Lightning crackled down outside and an odor of ozone permeated the unquiet air. Had he answered, it would have been lost in the avalanche of sound outside. Instead, he raised his scarred hands to his shirt collar and began to unbutton it. At once she drew herself up, eyes busy around her cabin, looking for a weapon. But when she looked back into his mad black gaze, something she saw there stopped her. And the thought that rapists usually start with their trousers, not their shirts. She looked down at what he was doing and understood. By the time he pulled the shirt off altogether, she was total professionalism, concentrating absolutely. Her mind focused so that even the cataclysm outside receded until nothing existed but her expertise and his poor, twisted body.

  He seemed to have been crushed. That was the only explanation that sprang to mind. She could only see his torso, of course, but nothing else could explain what she was looking at. The left side of his body seemed to have been crushed beneath some unimaginable thing or force. Something so massive that it should have killed him. Would have been far more merciful if it had killed him. Crushed him until his broken bones had cut their way out through his flesh. Then they had simply been tucked back into him and allowed to heal that way. He held himself erect. He seemed to move freely, normally. How he did so, she could not think: by the exercise of indomitable will. The twisted, tortured muscles stretching over the strange angular bones should not have worked at all. The bones themselves should not have held together. The joints, those many joints between ribs, breastbone, spine, shoulder, arm, hand, should not have worked. He should not have been able to breathe or move. This body should not contain life.

  Looking at it in dumb wonder, she was reminded of a haunting story she had once read where the survivor of a space crash in some far distant galaxy had been saved by kindly alien surgeons who had sewn her back together—but they did so without ever having seen a human body before. The result must have been something like this, she supposed.

  He did not flinch when her fingers probed gently down the twisted columns of his trapezius and latissimus dorsi, that long range of muscular hills astride the valley of his spine. The skin itself was not extensively scarred here, but from shoulder to knuckle on the left arm there was a network of scars the smallest end of which had served to distinguish this man from the other terrorists. He could have been crushed in a road accident, she supposed. Or trapped under a collapsing building.

  “There is nothing I can do for you. You know that.”

  “You can give me something for the pain.”

  She watched in fascination as the muscles writhed into awkward but effective motion. He must have been tended by someone with no medical knowledge at all. “Oh, I can do that all right, but I don’t think anyone could make this better.”

  “It was the hand of Allah, blessings be upon Him: it would be a sacrilege to make it better. But sometimes at night I weaken, for He asks me to bear more than I can endure. And I need…I need…”

  Thunder drowned out what he said, but she knew what he needed well enough. “You’d better come down to the surgery.”

  On the way down, her mind worked rapidly, trying to turn the situation to her best advantage. The scope for action was large. Ultimately she could kill him if she wanted: he would have no idea what she was actually giving him, after all. But that was a course of action she could not contemplate for long, even under these circumstances. She could try something that might yield long-term rewards without causing immediate reprisals, however. She could try for information.

  “You should keep a supply of pills with you,” she told him when they arrived. “But for now, I’ll give you an injection that will act more quickly. Only one injection. Then you’ll have to rely on the pills.” She paused, half hoping he would take the tablets and go. But he sat obediently on the examination table and rolled up his right sleeve.

  Asha slid the long needle into his pale flesh a
nd depressed the plunger. The porthole lit up dazzlingly and instant thunder roared. She held her breath and slid the needle out. John, Bob, and the rest were just next door. She felt their proximity acutely. God! How she wanted to help them. “Just stay sitting down,” she advised gently. “It will make you feel a little sleepy, I expect. I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. Lie down if you’d like to.”

  He swung round at her suggestion and lay back. His hands went to the folds of his kaffiyah but then hesitated. He had no intention that she should see his face. “Switch off the light,” he croaked.

  Sitting in the dark beside him she waited until the rhythm of his breathing told her he was asleep.

  “How did it happen?” she asked quietly.

  “…ship…” His voice was sleepy. Dreamy. The drug she had given him had killed his pain. Put him to sleep. Left him susceptible to suggestion, like sodiumpentathol. He would answer her questions quite freely for a while if she was careful what she asked.

  “A ship…” she prompted.

  “The bastard killed my father. He deserved everything he got. God, he was so easy to fool. Me. The owner. The Afrikaaners. Everybody fooled him. No oil. No problem. But she had to sink, you see. No evidence. No comebacks. Full insurance. Had to sink. Ask old Ben. Good old chap. Shift the ballast, tank to tank. Break her back.”

  “Break whose back?”

  “Easy? Christ, you’d think they’d know. Takes years of training to make sure we don’t break their backs every time.”

  “Whose back?”

  “Broke her back. Middle of a storm. Middle of the Channel. Perfect.”