by Peter Tonkin
Two things obviously counted against their hopedfor anonymity, thought Richard. Firstly, who they were. The moment they told anyone that they were the Heritage Mariner tanker Prometheus II heading from Bushehr to Hormuz, alarm bells would start ringing from here to the White House. God alone knew who would come sniffing around then. Secondly, Prometheus would stick out like a sore thumb to the men on Fate even before they saw her name, because she would be the only unladen tanker going out of the Gulf. But that situation was not insurmountable either, for the tanker carried pipes that could be lowered over the side. She had pumps that could suck sea water aboard once she was under way, and distribute it evenly among the tanks until she appeared to be fully laden.
Just as Ben Strong had done on the original Prometheus ten years ago, to conceal a missing cargo of oil.
Ben! Richard drove his fist against the helm. He gazed out along the darkening length of Prometheus’s great green deck, but he saw nothing of the pipes, tank tops, hatches, Sampson posts, winch housings, pumps, steps, and walkways before him. Saw nothing of the early sunset beyond. Instead he saw the face of Ben Strong, his godson. He saw it as he had last seen it, mad and murderous, behind the handgun he was an instant away from firing. An instant before his ship broke in two and hurled the madman to his death, insanely singing out, “Good-byeeeeeeee.”
And now here was the nightmare resurrected, his madness almost subsumed in Muslim fundamentalism, still at war with the world, and with Heritage Mariner. Able to lay his hands on all the weapons in a modern terrorist’s arsenal. The thought was absolutely chilling. Never in his wildest dreams would he have guessed that the mysterious Englishman and the unfortunate twin in blind Sinbad’s story should have been so closely related to themselves. It was as though Fate truly had a hand in this: the force, not the platform. Though who could tell the difference any more?
The lift doors behind him opened and John gasped in pain as he turned in the chair to see who was coming. “We can get her started,” called Robin. She and Martyr had been looking at the engine.
“We can get under way whenever you want.” The American’s deep bass replaced Robin’s warm contralto, and Richard turned to meet their expectant gazes at last.
Chris and Doc were on Katapult. Asha was in the surgery. Salah was checking the stores. The others were here, waiting for orders.
“Right,” said Richard. “We sail at sunset. It will take us twenty-two hours to get down the Gulf. If we move out of the lanes and slow down a little toward evening tomorrow, we can get everything set up and arrive with the last of the light. We’ll have three watches on the bridge but none in the engine room. Set that on auto and leave it. It should be all right for a day. Starting at eighteen hundred, John will be on watch up here with Salah and Asha. C. J., you will relieve them at ohone hundred tomorrow with Chris and Doc.”
“Fine,” agreed Martyr. “What about Katapult if they’re up here?”
“I’ve thought about that. We’ll have to tow her. It’s the only way. We need constant watches. If they sail her, they’ll have to keep twenty-four-hour watch themselves while we’ll be doing six hours on and six off. We’d all be exhausted by the time we hit Fate.”
“Yeah. I can see that. Okay, I’ll go tell them to batten down…”
“No. I’ll go in a minute. You and Robin had better go and get the engines ready. John, I’ll find Asha and send her up here. Then I’ll get the others out of Katapult. Secure her to the stern and see if the three of us can get the hook up.”
“Tall order for half an hour’s work,” observed John.
“It’s going to be bloody hard work for all during the next twenty-four hours, on watch and off. Can you work at the chart table, without too much discomfort?”
“Yes,” lied John cheerfully, heaving himself up out of the chair.
“Good. I need our best route to Fate worked out ready for when we set sail.”
“Consider it done,” said John. “In fact it has been done. I’ll check his workings if you like, but I’ll bet you that what Ben Strong has marked there will be just the ticket.”
“Perhaps,” said Richard dryly. “But he must have been laying for a smaller ship. The one that took them off last night.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’ll probably be the same. He was a good seaman.” Richard paused. “Then we’ll just have to hope,” he added as he went, “that whoever is steering Prometheus can follow the madman’s course.”
Richard found Asha in her surgery and sent her to the bridge. She was pleased enough to go, knowing that John would need her there if he was going to do much moving around. Salah was in the ship’s refrigerator, checking provisions as ordered. Richard sent him up to the bridge as well. He knew John would need an experienced helmsman the instant they got under way. He had designed the watches carefully so that there would be an experienced officer and helmsman available to each as well as a third person for lookout and emergency backup. Robin and he would take the last watch themselves, starting at 09:00 hours in the morning, while the others caught up on sleep or made final preparations. And after the end of their watch, at sunset tomorrow, Prometheus would either have a full complement once more, or she would be in no condition to need any watchkeepers at all.
These reflections were quite enough to take him out onto the baking foredeck where he came face to face with Chris and Doc, who had just finished securing Katapult at the foot of the accommodation ladder. Succinctly, Richard explained to them what he had told the others and the Australian nodded his agreement. Ten minutes later, Katapult was resecured on a long line to Prometheus’s afterdeck and the three of them were on the way to the forecastle head, racing like children on BMX bikes.
It was by no means a difficult or a lengthy task to winch Prometheus’s great anchor up off the shallow, sandy seabed, and, in the absence of tide, it made no real difference to her disposition whether the hook was up or down. Not even the south wind would move the inert mass of the tanker. Only her great screws could do that. And sure enough, as they sped back up toward the bridge, the deck began to throb beneath them and the steady blast of the southerly seemed to swing around the quarters so that as they returned the BMXs to the rack under the awning aft of the A deck door, a steady headwind blew in their faces along the deck. Prometheus was under way.
Five hours later, Richard sat back, massaging his tired eyes. Completed on the worktop before him were all his notes and contingency plans rendered into manageable form. He patted them with grim satisfaction. They would go into the log so that if anything went wrong in eighteen hours’ time…At the thought he glanced at his watch: 23:05 local time. Damn! He had run over the hour. He flicked a switch on the big transceiver beside him and caught the tail end of the World Service news.
“…the worst plague of recent years still moving north destroying millions of acres in the Ethiopian Rift Valley and on the Danakil plain in Eritrea. Experts hope that the strong southerly winds will blow them across the Red Sea and into the desert of Ar-rab al Khali where they will perish. This seems to be a faint hope and in the meantime, the people of Saudi Arabia are bracing themselves for the onslaught. And finally, cricket. The English batting collapsed at the Oval this afternoon in the face of an unremitting onslaught from the West Indian pace attack. England’s top scorer, with a total of seventeen runs, was…”
Richard made a peculiarly Scottish sound of disgust and turned it off. Time for bed, he calculated. A busy day over and a busier about to begin. He sat back in the spare chair on the bridge, the image of John’s captain’s chair except that it was on the starboard side. Salah Malik stood at the helm. John sat, half asleep, in the captain’s chair. Asha, her face green and ghostly, divided her scrutiny between her patient and the collision alarm radar that watched the waters around them, alert for danger there.
“I’ll just set this to an open emergency channel. Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said. But he showed no sign of moving. For the first time
since coming aboard he had a little leisure to luxuriate in the simple fact of being back aboard. Katapult had been like a holiday, vivid and exciting. But this was like coming home. All his senses were attuned to the familiar sensations around him, from the steady throbbing of the engines coming through the floor to the sight of a star-bright, calm Gulf night distanced by the clearview. The smell of the conditioned air. The taste of it on the back of his tongue. The sheer size of his bridge. Of his vessel.
Home.
Humming a little tune to himself, he went off to look for Robin. When he found her, he would take her to the officers’ pantry and they would make a cup of cocoa, drink it, and go to bed. It was what they did at midnight every night when they were at sea together. The prospect of it made his contentment complete, almost as though he were insensible to the danger they would be in tomorrow.
In eighteen hours’ time every single one of them could be dead.
They were up again before six, well aware that it would take the better part of twelve hours to get sufficient water aboard to make Prometheus seem like just another laden tanker outbound through Hormuz.
As the swift dawn broke into yet another stifling day, so they worked, with Richard firmly in command and—typically—the most active. To pipe heads standing three feet high, they attached great hoses that reached left and right across the deck before the bridgehouse. The deck railings were opened, and the ends of the hoses rolled overboard to fall thundering against Prometheus’s high sides, down into the sluggish sea. The ends of the hoses plunged deep beneath the surface, dragged back toward the stern at once by the tanker’s steady progress through the water.
Richard ran to the cargo control room at once. Its long window looked forward to where the pipes were attached. Here Robin was just completing the programming of the computers according to the plans they had agreed on last night. Now the Mariners stood shoulder to shoulder as she punched in the final instructions. The computers immediately communicated with the pumps in the pump room three sheer decks below. The main pumps thundered into life, sucking in water past the filters at the pipes’ ends. As it came aboard, the filtered water was fed immediately into a system of smaller pipes controlled by secondary pumps that passed it in carefully measured increments evenly into the tanks along Prometheus’s massive length.
In the cargo control room, displays automatically monitored the disposition of the cargo. Schematics of the ship lit up, each tank represented by a safe green box, as strategically located sensors read the forces unleashed by the movement of the liquid through the system. The greatest danger came from the shear force, that terrific tension that could arise at the junction of improperly laden tanks where the upward force of a buoyant empty tank ran up against the downward force of a full one. Mistakes in lading could tear—had torn—tankers apart in seconds.
But Robin was far too competent a cargo-control officer to allow anything of the kind to happen. And in any case, the task of controlling the oncoming water as it passed relatively slowly along two basic channels was not one she would find particularly hard. She was used to calculating the shear forces unleashed when six or eight tanks were being loaded all at once. They stood side by side in silence until it was clear that the programs were coping successfully with the work. Then Richard looked at his watch. “The automatic alarms will ring here, in the engine room, and on the bridge if there’s a problem,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They took the watch at once, early. Richard crossed to the helm and relieved Weary with a clap on the shoulder that made the big man jump and look around, bewildered.
“Time for some rest, Doc,” he said.
The sound of his name stopped the frown of confusion on Doc’s face and he turned away with a grin to shamble over toward Chris, who was dozing on her feet by the collision alarm radar. Robin went over to C. J. Martyr, the only one of the watchkeepers truly awake. When she put her hand on his shoulder, he automatically rubbed it with his steel-stubbled jawline, a piece of easy intimacy as though she were as much of a daughter to him as was Christine.
“I’d never have believed he could have survived,” he rumbled, talking to Richard as much as to her. “And given that he did, I’d never have thought he would come back like this.”
The first Prometheus had been breaking up, splitting in two halfway down her long deck in a storm in the En- glish Channel. Martyr and Robin had been out on that doomed deck together in pursuit of the man who had masterminded poisonings and murders to cover the illegal sale of her cargo, and the lethal attempts to have her sunk for insurance. That man had been the first officer, the captain’s godson, Ben Strong. When the ship had broken up, Richard, Salah, and the others had saved the two of them. And they had all seen Ben Strong, splayed on the forward section, whirled away to destruction as it had sunk. How could a man trapped in such a cataclysm, sucked down to such an end, return ten years later to take his mad revenge? Or, more correctly from the look of things, to make the settling of his account with Heritage Mariner a part of his larger plan.
For it was clear enough, and had been from the outset as they looked back on it, now wise with hindsight, that the pirating of Prometheus II was almost incidental to the overall plan. A ruse to keep the eyes of the world on one end of the Gulf while the real work went on at the other. Preoccupied with the drama at Bushehr, who had given a second thought to Fate? The planning behind it, the preparation, and the cunning were deeply disturbing. Perhaps the cunning most of all. While they were on Fate, waiting for a lost ship, unaware that she would never come, the terrorists’ defenses were at their lowest, and Richard’s plan stood a chance. But the moment they realized that Dawn of Freedom was not coming, the instant that they realized that something had gone wrong—anything at all—such a well-prepared, clever team as Ben Strong had assembled would be bound to come up with an equally effective alternative. And once they did that, the whole world was likely to be helpless, as it had been in the affair so far. And then what hope would the team on Prometheus stand? Eight desperate people undermanning a half-empty supertanker.
At the helm, Richard glanced up at the chronometers above his head. 08:59 local time. Good. Caught it this time. “Log on, Robin, will you? And, just as you do, get the radio please.”
They crossed to the chart table where the logbook lay, then Martyr stayed, tidying up his entry before he signed over to Robin. She hit the switch on the receiver and a quiet voice filled the bridge.
“This is the BBC World Service. Here is the news at six o’clock A.M., Greenwich Mean Time…”
“You think we’re going to be on it?” asked Robin, her voice brittle, caught between playfulness and grimness.
“If we are, I hope it hasn’t been updated recently. If I were Ben, I’d be tuned in to it. It might just be a useful early warning. Best he’ll have, unless he has a satellite receiver down there and a television for the twenty-four-hour news stations.” Richard’s voice, unnaturally gruff, was beginning to show the strain. She couldn’t read his expression, outlined as he was by the blinding glare.
“…news from Tehran of the continuing power struggle within the Iranian armed forces. Sources close to the Iranian government suggest that it is the officers in the Iranian Air Force who are loyal to the regime. Officers in the Iranian Navy, however…”
“This is getting close,” said Robin. “Wait for it!”
“The United States Sixth fleet continues to perform maneuvers in the Gulf of Oman but has yet to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The White House reiterated yesterday that, while the current climate persists, the fleet will not…”
“No, it’s too long,” said Robin with some relief. “I don’t think they’ll mention us…”
“There is no doubt however, that the taking of the Heritage Mariner supertanker Prometheus Two, with its full complement of forty men and women, has considerably worsened an already tense situation. There is no further news of Sir William Heritage, chairman of Heritage Mariner. And still no official react
ion from Heritage Mariner itself.”
“Quite an item!” spat Martyr, his voice heavy with disgust.
“Nothing compared to what it would be if they knew what Heritage Mariner’s reaction actually is,” observed Robin dryly.
“And now the rest of the world news. Remaining in the Middle East, it is now reported from the city of Ubaylah in Saudi Arabia…”
“Well, so far so good,” said Richard, much relieved. “Nobody seems to have noticed that we’ve gone. Still nine hours to go, though. And we’re likely to stir up a hornets’ nest when we report in…”
“But we haven’t been challenged by any of the coastal stations yet,” said Robin matter-of-factly. “After all, what are we to them? One more blip on their radar going the same way as all the other blips, like one more freight car on an infinite train. What do they care?”
“They’d care quickly enough if they realized.”
“But they haven’t. And they won’t unless they get in contact directly. They wouldn’t even expect to hear from us until we get close enough to Hormuz to start asking for a pilot. And anyway, if anyone does contact us, why tell them the truth? Unless they come out here and look us over, how are they going to know? I’ve got all the Heritage Mariner sailing schedules in my head. So have you, Richard. Neptune should be in the Gulf now. We’ll just say we’re Neptune if anyone asks us. At the very least it’ll confuse the hell out of them for a while. Christ! We only need nine hours.”
In the silence, the bulletin continued, “…scientists have recently discovered they do not fly directly downwind. The configuration of their wings is such that they actually fly across the wind at an angle dictated by the sun. The southerly winds presently dominating the region during the day, therefore, mean that a northeasterly course is more likely. The citizens of Dubai…”