The Fire Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  “Well, let’s not worry about it until it happens,” decided Richard.

  “As the actress said to the bishop,” quoted Martyr.

  “Can I smell coffee?” asked Robin.

  “…as far as Bandar Abbas and Zahedan in Iran.”

  Salah came in through the door with four steaming mugs. Robin’s nose wrinkled. One of the side effects of her present condition was super sensitivity to smells which, on the one hand meant that she could smell the coffee coming long before the others, but on the other hand meant that she couldn’t actually face it when it came. And she thought she had been getting over morning sickness. What she really fancied, actually, was a morsel of cheese…

  And so the day proceeded. Richard had the con. Robin kept watch on the collision alarm radar and slipped out onto the bridge-wings with binoculars whenever she got the chance; checked their position on the satellite navigation system against the notes on the course in Ben’s neat handwriting; ran down to the cargo control room during the quieter moments to check that the tanks were filling all right, and every time she did so, she popped into the galley for just one more sliver of cheddar cheese.

  The others had a rest, or pretended to, each lying alone and tense in his or her cabin. Only Christine and Doc shared each other’s company, he sleeping like a baby while she kept watch beside him, watchful for when he awoke. And when he did spring awake, at a quarter to four, she was still there, still watching, wideeyed. But he knew who he was and remembered what was going on.

  By four they were all on the bridge, waiting for Richard’s final briefing. For the last two hours, Richard had been cutting speed and pulling north so that now they were dawdling along the very top edge of the one-way, east-bound channel just southwest of the island of Tanb e Borzog. Now he swung north again and cut power altogether. Prometheus continued to coast forward, dominated by the massive momentum of her fully laden tanks, out of the shipping lanes altogether until she came to rest, still facing east, safely behind the shallows stretching down from Tanb.

  While the way was slowly coming off her, Richard took them over the plans for one last time, and the moment she was dead in the water they all hurried away to start assigned tasks. By five to five only Richard and John were left on the bridge. Richard stood by the helm, staring morosely down the deck. John sat in the right-hand chair—not the captain’s chair—by the radio, with one of the walkie-talkies by his side. During the next five minutes it squawked almost continuously.

  “Asha here, John. Ready.”

  “Martyr here, Captain. Ready. Over.”

  “Robin here. Ready but out of cheese.”

  “Weary here. Ready when you are. We’ll hold as planned for as long as possible.”

  Seventeen hundred hours local time clicked up.

  “They’re all ready, Richard.”

  “World Service News, please, John. One last time.”

  “And here is the news at two o’clock…”

  “Fingers crossed, eh, Richard?”

  “Fingers crossed, John.”

  “It has just been reported from the Arabian Gulf that the Heritage Mariner supertanker Prometheus has vanished…”

  “Hell’s teeth!”

  “The tanker, taken over by terrorists recently, has been anchored for over a week off the Iranian coast at Bushehr…”

  “Martyr. Martyr, can you hear me? Engine room. Come in!”

  “…but unconfirmed reports started arriving this morning that the ship had been moved during the night…”

  “Engine room here, Richard…”

  “The story’s broken on the world news, Chief. They’re broadcasting it now…”

  “…Iranian authorities have just confirmed that Prometheus is no longer at Bushehr, although news from that troubled state…”

  “Chief, I want full speed ahead, as fast as you can give it to me.” Richard’s hand moved on the engineroom telegraph, confirming his words even as he spoke: FULL AHEAD. Immediately he felt the whole ship begin to shudder as the twin screws thrashed the seas behind her. He felt life come into the tiny helm beneath his sweating palms as she began to gather way. The low gold shoulder of the island began to move across his vision and he swung Prometheus onto her new heading southeast, choosing the shortest route between themselves and their target little more than fifteen miles away across the quiet, unsuspecting Gulf.

  Aiming to hurl her like a great javelin across the slow-moving, humdrum eastbound sea lanes, to hurl his command at Fate, at flank speed, no matter what the risks or consequences.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “An urgent search is currently being carried out all through the Arabian Gulf to try to discover what has become of her…”

  “Ben! Ben, can you hear me?” Fatima spoke feverishly into the walkie-talkie, praying that Ben was listening in somewhere close at hand. Not for the first time, she cursed the old platform for being so big. It was a long way from their center of operations to this lookout post down here.

  “Fatima? What is it?”

  “It’s gone, Ben. Prometheus has disappeared. It’s on the news.”

  “They’ve moved it. Someone’s gone aboard and moved it. It must be Mariner. I’m on my way down. Don’t tell the others yet. I’ll have to think this through.”

  Fatima sat back, breathing deeply, trying to calculate what this might mean. The words of the rest of the bulletin whispered meaninglessly in the background.

  “…over Dubai. Observers say it is among the largest ever seen and reports speak of the sun being obscured…”

  She could not sit still. She left the radio on but she could not bear to stay beside it. Long before the bulletin was finished or Ben arrived, she had begun her restless prowling. She was in the rig foreman’s office, the equivalent of a ship’s bridge. It was a long, spacious room, chosen to be their forward observation post because it gave such excellent views north across the shipping lanes to the Iranian island of Queshm twenty miles away. But the shipping lanes were nowhere near that wide, for there were seven miles of shoals and shallows: the Flat, they were called, and the Mariner shoal…

  “Mariner!” Ben exploded into the room, almost hobbling in his hurry to get up here. When he walked at his own pace, in careful control of the wreck of his body, he could move normally. But let him rush, or try to run, as now, and his rebellious muscles twisted and turned him until he became almost hunchbacked. In their early days together, when his body twisted thus, she would sit for hours massaging him and listening dreamily to the story of how he was picked up, thinking himself dead, by a freighter in the English Channel. The little ship was crewed by Iranians. They never told him where they had been loading in Europe, but they were returning with war supplies to Bandar Komenhi at the north of the Gulf, and they were happy to take him with them. How he had come to be there, afloat in that stormy sea, how he had been reduced to the state he was in, he also never revealed. He treated his rescue as though it had been a new birth. He had been born again into Islam. As the freighter made its slow way back to Bandar Komenhi, he had been re-created, physically, spiritually, mentally. The gentle crew had adopted him, nurtured him, educated him in all aspects save one. He was when he came aboard, and he remained, an outstanding seaman. And, when Bandar Komenhi had been attained, he revealed that he knew the Gulf like the back of his hand. To the Iranians, it was little short of a miracle. And one of which they made increasing use, for the Bandar ports were hard up against the border with Iraq and, as the war between the two of them intensified, so the mysterious English convert joined the fleets of dhows who were doing for Iran what the little ships at Dunkirk had done for England forty years before. And there he made the contacts who now supported his personal jihad.

  Romantic stories they had seemed to her then. Now she asked herself more often what really lay behind them since the murder of First Officer Smyke; especially since he had told her there was more to the plan than she knew.

  “I know Mariner,” fumed Ben. “I know t
hat murderous bastard of old. He won’t be sitting still for this. He’ll be up to some scheme or other. God, how I wish I’d killed him. Him and his bitch of a wife!”

  Fatima had never seen Ben like this before and she stood aghast. A feeling of helplessness swept over her. A familiar feeling that had never been far away since that terrible day when she had stepped off the plane in Kuwait to find her father waiting for her, not dying after all. She was not a weak or subservient person, but she was beginning again to feel like the victim of forces far beyond her control. Once more she was feeling used.

  She should have trusted her better instincts and stayed with the one person she knew for certain she could trust—Asha. But that was in the past now, far beyond recall, like those pointless letters she had written. Asha hadn’t even recognized her until she had revealed herself. No, she was utterly alone now, so she had better get a grip.

  “Calm down, Ben,” she said quietly. “You know it makes the others nervous if we speak for too long in English and they cannot understand. And to see you like this as well…” She looked meaningfully across to where Ali was seated, dutifully staring into the bowl of their smaller radar set, his body unnaturally tense.

  “It is bad enough that Dawn of Freedom is late and we are trapped here with the hostages and so few weapons. If you begin showing too much strain as well, you may sow the seeds of panic.” In her passion she pulled her kaffiyah open and frowned at him, her face naked, willing him to be calm. And her action shocked him: she could see it in his eyes. So traditional had he become in the ways of his new religion, that he saw a woman’s face unveiled in public as a sin. She turned away bitterly, rearranging her headdress, too well aware that her days as an equal member of the group were numbered. Soon he would find a convenient prison to condemn her to, just as her father had.

  So the time for her own holy war was running short indeed: no matter what he demanded when the sea lanes had been closed, she must be sure her voice was heard as well, demanding freedom for all the sisters who found the yoke of submission too heavy to bear. Freedom from the abba, yashmak, and chador. Equality under the law.

  “So the tanker has been moved, according to the unbelievers’ news,” she said, speaking in Arabic.

  “What difference does it make to us?” Ben’s ruined voice had regained its icy calm. His twisted body came erect. Their leader had returned. “It is just another tanker now. Just another easy target as it tries to move through Hormuz.” He strode across to the window and positioned himself so that he could watch the tanker lanes and see into the radar over Ali’s shoulder. The light blips in the green bowl registered themselves as dark, funereal shapes, moving in dolorous series before him. High sided and empty, away in the distance close to Queshm. Low and fully laden, scant miles away, each one filling even this huge window as it passed. What targets they would make when Dawn of Freedom arrived. “The last few,” he said, calm now. “The last few to pass by Fate without knowing we are here.”

  His black eyes looked down from the window into the radar bowl watching the radial line sweep round like the second hand on a clock, lighting up all the obstacles between themselves, at its center, and Queshm to the north, with its naval base to which he could look for help as the situation progressed. Counting the chain of tankers—each vessel a link—passing in and out in regular, predictable series.

  Behind him, the woman turned the radio to Hormuz frequency and the room filled with the quiet communication between the coastal station and the ships. She had not asked his permission to do that. She was becoming unreliable. And as for that shameless display just now…

  Something was wrong.

  He forgot about the woman and concentrated on the radar.

  Something was very wrong.

  “What is that?” he snapped, his finger stabbing down.

  “I don’t know,” said Ali, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I’ve never seen…”

  “Fatima. Look at this. What do you make of it?”

  It was not in front of them but behind them. Not over the tanker lanes at all but sweeping north along a line stretching from Rass al Kaimah to Sharja. Not from the coast, either: from above the coast. Whatever it was, it was airborne. He went cold. This had been his nightmare.

  “Do you think it could be planes?” asked Fatima. “It’s difficult to tell.”

  “Then let’s go and look. Quickly!” He was in motion at once, moving rapidly enough to twist himself all out of shape. His left arm curled up by his chest. He began to hurry crabwise to the door.

  For once, the pain of his rapid movement was as nothing. Inside he was raging with tension. It had to be an airborne attack. It had to be. He had always reckoned that the hostages would be an effective barrier against such a thing—against any sort of attack at all. He had chosen them carefully, his contacts with that greedy fool Cecil Smyke allowing him full knowledge of the crewing of the Heritage Mariner ships. And their flagship Prometheus had furnished him with so much. English, Chinese, Pakistanis, Palestinians. The American, son of a senator, nephew to an admiral. He had hardly needed to bother with a Knight of the British Realm. But he owed Sir William Heritage, and taking him would hurt Robin and Richard most. All in all, they had seemed perfect protection even against the hysteria a closed Gulf would bring. But not against one of the emirates or sultanates if they decided to go it alone, and hang the consequences. Not against some madman in the Iranian Air Force with a squadron of fighters and blood in his eye. The struggle for power in the Iranian forces could not have come at a worse time for him. But recognition for his naval friends and supporters would just be another demand, when the time came, and they knew it. Unless this was the Iranian Air Force now.

  All it would take was one concerted rocket attack. Fate was not as solid as it looked.

  With these thoughts threatening to burst his head as his heart threatened to tear itself from his mutilated breast, he hurled himself out onto the flat roof of the tallest prefab facing south and, with binoculars jammed almost painfully into his eyes, he looked out into the evening sky.

  Five miles due east, heading west at twenty knots, Robin Mariner was also studying the southern sky. She was standing on the afterdeck of Prometheus, between the swimming pool and the helipad. Behind her, the tanker’s little Westland Wasp was uncovered, unfettered, fueled and ready to go. Robin was of two minds about her part in Richard’s plan. She understood everything he had told her about the importance of total surprise—that was elementary. And she saw that it followed logically that he had to be careful how he used the radio, therefore. Ben would know by now that Prometheus had vanished. He would realize that the people most likely to move her this fast were her owners. He would be expecting them to be up to something, listening for clues of their whereabouts, ready to start executing hostages at the first whisper of them. It was absolutely imperative that the first solid indication of her presence would be her bows bearing down on him at full speed, so close that he had to start defending his command at once, for only then did the hostages stand a chance. And again, it followed from that, that the only way to get the help they so desperately needed was to go and ask for it. Only she, in the Westland, could do that. But all along she really knew what this was all about: Richard wanted her and the baby well clear of Prometheus and Fate when the two of them came together.

  So she stood, calculatingly, beside the little helicopter, looking south and thinking. But then her thoughts began to be disturbed by what she was looking at. Even without the aid of binoculars, it was clear something was wrong down there. The sky between here and Sharja City was black. Not with early evening. Not even with clouds. With something more. It chilled her to look at that roiling black mass even when she had no clear idea what she was seeing. Some atavistic memory buried deep in her bones made her blood run cold as she watched it sweeping toward her, high in the last of the south wind. She hesitated. What should she do? Should she depart from the plan in the last instants before it got properly under way? S
hould she go up onto the bridge and warn Richard? Pop into the surgery and tell Asha before she took off? She had put her personal radio in the Westland when she was getting it ready. It was on the pilot’s seat. She could sit inside and talk to the bridge from there. A couple of quick words about this strange biblical phenomenon then off to get help. As she turned to climb into the helicopter’s little cabin, something landed on the deck behind her and hopped into the pool.

  “Steady as you go,” said John from behind the collision alarm radar. “I’ve got a clear echo. You should be able to see it now. Dead ahead, five miles.”

  “The light’s going pretty quickly,” answered Richard, concern creeping into his voice. “What’s the time?”

  “Eighteen hundred. Dead on sunset. You should be all right for light.”

  “There’s some kind of cloud or fog coming in from starboard. Damned if I can make it out. Strangest thing.”

  Richard’s personal radio buzzed. He lifted his left hand from the helm and raised the black box like a telephone handset, never taking his eyes off the sea ahead. “Yes?”

  “It’s Robin. There’s some kind of cloud coming up out of Sharja…”

  “I see it. It’s reaching right round to Hormuz by the look of it. You’d better steer clear of it when you take off.”

  “Don’t worry. I will!”

  “And Robin…”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you. Take care.”

  “I love you too, Richard. Oh, my God!”

  “Robin! Robin, what is it? Robin!”

  Asha was busy in the surgery, tensely preparing her medical equipment to receive the wounded. She had talked it over with Richard and they were both of the opinion that she had better get ready for gunshot wounds. And she knew exactly what she would need to treat those, after her recent experiences with John.