The Fire Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Then she saw something in those eyes she had never seen before and glanced involuntarily up over her shoulder.

  And saw the massive metal section immediately above their heads tear itself loose from the platform and fall.

  “Chrissie!” screamed Martyr, looking back like Lot’s wife; like Orpheus to lose his dream.

  Salah and he had pulled themselves to their feet the instant after Weary fell, and stood for long enough to see Chris pull him aboard. Then they had run across the bucking steel to the relative solidity afforded by the first of the buildings. Salah kicked the door in and they slung the bags into a long corridor, jumping in behind them. As they did so, the shaking stopped and a sudden, stunning silence replaced it. They knelt, gasping. And a tearing, screaming roaring overwhelmed them. A fountain of spray deluged them. A cold wind fanned them.

  And Martyr looked back.

  The metal platform they had just jumped onto, sixty feet by sixty, more than a foot thick, undergirdered for added strength, weighing God knew how many tons, was gone. Katapult, beneath it, was gone. The corridor they were kneeling in now looked out onto a heaving, foaming maelstrom where the multihull used to be. Where Doc and Martyr’s daughter used to be.

  “Chrissie! I’ve got to go down after her, Salah.”

  “It’s no use, Chief. They’re gone.”

  “But you don’t understand. She’s all I’ve got! She can’t be gone. I’ve got to go down after her!”

  “Look! We’ve got a job to do! I can’t do it alone. The others are relying on us. Martyr!” He used his most brutal tone. It shocked the man and he hated to do it. But what he had said was true. Without their effort, the whole enterprise was doomed. Martyr flinched. Some semblance of reason returned to those deep green eyes. “We’ll look for her later,” said Salah and they were off.

  Behind them, the last of the bubbles rose out of the tossing water and the sea slowly returned to a calm, as though it had never swallowed anything at all.

  Richard had the other Heckler and Koch MP-5 held out at arm’s length in front of him, pushing it forward along the deserted corridors. He left doors open behind him; the locusts followed him into the buildings, hopping along the passages he had vacated. He was looking for Ben. He found no one. Nothing.

  Behind the buildings ruined by the collision, there was an open space. In its center stood the rusting remains of the drilling equipment. Beyond it stood the hill of prefabs that had housed the rig’s crew in the days when it had been in service. Richard looked up at it, calculatingly. If he were in charge here, he would put his headquarters at the top. Better communications. Overview of everywhere around. And there were lights to be seen up there, strengthening his supposition. So, if the HQ was up there, that was where Ben would be. Ben was his prime objective. Ben was his responsibility: being a godfather counted for something, after all!

  He ran to the rusting derrick and paused, looking around. The upper works of his ship peered over the destruction she had caused. Her lights lit up this part of the rig, showing it to be empty. He turned, then turned back, thinking that something was wrong. He saw what it was: the air was clear. The locusts had gone. He gave a lean smile and ran forward toward the illuminated shantytown of the prefabricated huts, crunching the last of the insects beneath his feet.

  Salah went through the first doorway and entered the prefabricated building like a ghost. There was no one immediately to be seen, but the corridor ahead led to a stairway that was certain to be guarded. He paused for an instant, mind racing, then he slid out again, grabbing the bundle of bags Martyr was guarding. Together, they slung them through the doorway he had just checked. With his chin, Salah gestured toward the stairway. Martyr nodded. They left the bags of weapons where they were and raced forward on silent feet. If there was a guard there, he would have been alerted— they had by no means come silently through the door that second time. And sure enough, when they reached the foot of the stairs, a hail of bullets greeted them.

  So much for silent surprise, thought Salah, as he reached for a thunderflash.

  Richard rolled through the doorway and into a massive room. At first, he paused, disoriented, trying to make sense of what he could see. Then the figures of his crew became part of the background, as someone started to shoot at him. He had been looking for the headquarters, expecting it to be up here, but instead he had stumbled into the lecture hall where the hostages were. This was not going according to plan at all. A wiry figure in battle fatigues spun toward him; he fired automatically, without even thinking, and the man spun away. At the corner of his vision, someone else stood up, aiming at him. He scrabbled round feverishly, trying to draw a bead, and the figure was gone under a pile of erstwhile prisoners. Inundated, without a further shot being fired.

  He picked himself up, overcome. And they were gathered around him at once, wanting to shake his hand, thump him on the back…“No!” he called, above their cheering. “It’s not over!”

  They quieted at once.

  “Bob, you can’t come with me, not with your leg like that. You and Bill stay in charge in here, please. Kerem, you and Twelve Toes take the guns from the guards. We’re looking for the other terrorists. Watch out, the rest of you. If we don’t find them all, then some of them will be coming back in here.”

  You could have heard a pin drop. Thirty-five unarmed men silently weighing up their chances if the terrorists did come back. So near yet so far after all.

  “But Salah Malik and C. J. Martyr are on their way up with guns for you, too,” he added, and left them cheering again.

  At the sound of the first thunderflash, Ben sent two more of his men hurrying toward the rear of the platform. That left four more in here with himself, Fatima, and Ali, who was trying to raise Queshm naval base on the radio. The main command center was the highest of the buildings on the platform, towering even above the lecture hall where the hostages were. It had been the rig’s communications center, much larger than the radio rooms Ben was used to even on supertankers. It had windows looking east, west, south, and north. Ben had brought tables and chairs, cooking equipment, as well as radios and the main radar in here. There was a cot in the corner for the watchkeeper and another one for Ben, who habitually slept here. For the little that he did sleep.

  He was now using the room as his defense post. His defensive plan was simple and dictated by circumstances. He and his command team would remain here until he had contacted Queshm and called the Iranian gunboats in. As his enemies approached, so he would send out men to support the ring of guards already out. He was working on the assumption that Mariner could not have brought more than half a dozen with him; he could even list their names. As soon as he had talked to Queshm, he would move down to the lecture hall where he could make full use of the hostages.

  As the door closed behind the first two, who unknowingly were going out against Salah and C. J. Martyr, Ali swung round in his chair triumphantly. “I have Queshm,” he announced.

  Ben’s hand reached for the microphone, but stopped in midgesture. In the distance, he could hear cheering.

  “Take two men down to the lecture theater,” he said quietly to Fatima. “Two men and the machine gun.”

  Salah stepped over the body of the boy at the stair-head and glanced around the corner into a long, broad corridor. A flash of movement at the far end was followed by a burst of fire. He jerked back as the corner of the wall exploded into splinters. Then Martyr was there beside him, face white, hands shaking. It might have been fear but Salah knew better. “We’re pinned down here,” he whispered. “Long corridor. Good man at the far end. We’ll have to look for another way up.”

  “Why bother?” asked Martyr. “Chuck a grenade.”

  Salah slung another thunderflash around the corner and Martyr was gone after it on a count of three. He departed, seemingly, into the thunderous glare of it and Salah wasn’t far behind. Martyr was halfway up the corridor, AK-47 at his hip, hosing the far corner with fire. The thin wood of the pr
efabricated wall turned into a smoking colander and the terrorist using it for cover collapsed into view. Martyr ran over to him and kicked his weapons away. “Let’s get going,” he said.

  Salah ran back for the bags with the American at his shoulder and a frown on his face. He was paired with a man who had decided he had nothing left to live for, and that was very worrying indeed.

  Fatima flattened herself against the wall just outside the control center and listened as though her life depended upon it. Her men ran on before her with the generalpurpose machine gun as Ben had ordered, but she was slower to obey. Ben spoke tersely to the Iranian naval officer at Queshm, the same man who had overseen the movement of the hostages from Prometheus to Fate; the man who was relying on Ben and the rest of them to close the Gulf and save his bacon before he became another victim of the ruthless purge going on in Iran at the moment. This part of the plan she knew all about and understood. But from the moment Ben had let slip that there was more going on—about that other timetable he had mentioned aboard Prometheus while they had been waiting for the gunboats to move the hostages—she had been on guard. It had been the final piece in a pattern of growing mistrust she could now see stretching back for a surprisingly long time.

  At every opportunity she had spied and watched and listened, trying to discover what this man whom she had trusted with so much for so long was keeping hidden from her. And now, at this last moment, her efforts were rewarded. For, the moment Ben broke contact with Queshm, he was ordering Ali to contact someone else—and Fatima’s blood was running cold at the sound of his calm, hypocritical, lying voice.

  “Get me Dahran now,” said Ben. “Here is the wavelength and the call sign.”

  “Through,” answered Ali almost at once.

  “This is the Dawn of Freedom,” said Ben, in English, which only he and Fatima understood, clearly speaking into the microphone. “I wish to speak to His Excellency Prince Assad.”

  There was the briefest of silences and then Ben’s voice continued, dripping unctuousness, “Your Excellency, we are ready. Everything is at last complete. Please transfer the payment now. Yes, now is the time for you and your associates to move in Aqaba, before the story breaks worldwide. My payment: as you rightly recall, one hundred thousand American dollars a day into the Swiss account. No, it has not gone absolutely smoothly, but we have nothing to fear. The reinforcements are coming in from Queshm as arranged. Yes, it will look like an Iranian affair as planned. Yes, of course the Americans will continue to hesitate, everyone will, and the Gulf will stay closed for as long as possible. Only through Aqaba, yes…”

  Fatima turned away and ran on down the stairs after her men, only a moment or two behind them, so briefly had she needed to pause. She had eavesdropped for such a short time, but what she had learned was such a complete reversal of everything she had believed. She felt an overwhelming urge to stop and scream but she ran on in a daze of shock, her lean body moving by instinct. Her mind could feel itself thinking, so deep was the shock. It was like the moment she had realized the truth about her father’s so-called illness and his actual plans for her. She could hardly believe it was happening to her all over again. Blindly she ran on, her breath coming in ragged sobs, something deep inside her crying, “Trapped, trapped, trapped; betrayed, betrayed, betrayed.”

  Ben’s plan stood fully revealed and so easy to understand now. The greed behind all that cant about liberating their brothers and sisters in the great international army of freedom fighters. The lies he had told about his friends in Iran—the lies he must have told to his friends in Iran. All so he could close the Gulf, as he was just about to do, not in the cause of freedom or in the cause of justice, but for a hundred thousand dollars a day. American dollars. In his own Swiss bank account.

  To be paid by the men in Dahran who controlled the refineries at the port of Aqaba. Aqaba, at the far end of the longest desert oil pipeline of all. Aqaba, on the Red Sea. Aqaba, the only way left to get crude out of the whole of Arabia when the Strait of Hormuz was closed. And how much would it be worth then to be the only people in the Middle East able to supply any oil at all? Compared with the likely profits of such a scheme, one hundred thousand dollars a day was less than nothing.

  And then, there was the source of the money to be considered, too. That certainly bore careful thinking about. For Ben’s blood money was due to be paid by His Excellency, Prince Assad.

  His Excellency, Prince Assad: her father.

  Two terrorists came round the corner at a run, without having checked ahead. It was such a gross mistake under these circumstances that it all but beggared belief. Certainly the confrontation was so unexpected that everyone froze. Richard, Kerem, and Twelve Toes had been moving forward so carefully in case their enemies were waiting in ambush, that to have two of them jump out like this was, to say the least, surprising. The five men stood there for an instant, about three feet apart. Then Richard hit the nearest on the side of the head with the stock of his gun. It was a roundhouse right hook, and would probably have felled the man even had Richard not been holding the MP-5. As it was, the first terrorist, instantly unconscious, flew into the second one, knocking him down as well. Kerem’s desert boot finished the almost silent exchange. “More presents,” said Richard lightly, as they stripped the men of their weapons. “Kerem, take these back to the others. Make yourself up a little commando unit of three. Look for Salah and C. J. Then come looking for me.”

  Kerem was gone almost at once. “Now, remind me,” said Richard to the chief steward, “How should a turkey be trussed?”

  The cheers that greeted Salah and C. J. were almost as loud as the cheers that had greeted Richard. Within moments the guns they brought had been distributed and the hostages were surging toward the doors like the mob assaulting the Bastille. None of the men notionally in charge could hold them and they dashed out into the corridor, looking for terrorists to kill. They found three immediately. Fortunately for Prometheus’s crew, Fatima, just catching up with her men, did not have time to deploy the machine gun properly, or she would have killed most of that first wave, if not all of them. The man holding the GPMG opened fire at them with it at once and all but blew himself off his feet. The tracer shots went high and wide, tearing prefabricated walls and ceilings into smoking ruins before it jammed. Fatima and the second man flicked the safeties off their assault rifles, and the shouting mob was gone.

  “Set that up to cover the doors. Get it unjammed, fool.” Fatima ordered. “We will guard you from here.”

  But even as she spoke, the head of the man she was addressing exploded. She whirled, searching for her enemy. The second man, beside her, staggered back crazily fast, as though this were a speeded-up film, throwing his rifle away. But Fatima could see him now, a tall Palestinian at the far end of the corridor, familiar from the captive crew. Kerem, they called him. Kerem was standing even as she was standing, looking down an assault rifle at her. She fired first and he fell.

  Then she was swinging round incredibly quickly, knowing what had to happen next. The first man out through the lecture hall doors was tall, gray-haired, distinguished looking. She shot him in the chest. The second man out was another Palestinian.

  But this time he shot her.

  Salah crossed swiftly to the terrorist woman who had shot Martyr all but through the heart and knelt briefly at her side as he moved her gun away. She lay still as death, huge dark eyes staring upward. They were running with tears and for a moment the tall Palestinian thought they were tears of shock or pain. But then he saw how wet her cheeks were and realized she must have been weeping all along. Then, for some time, he found his mind returning to her, wondering what in the world could have caused her to cry like that.

  Ben was beating madly on the rim of the radar, howling with joy. There, in the bright green bowl, weaving their way through the slow tankers, coming to his aid at more than thirty knots, were the four gunboats his naval friend had promised him.

  “Ben!” The voice calle
d quietly from nearby. And from far away, down memory lane, Ben stopped what he was doing, as though carved in rock. Uncle Dick was just outside the door. Uncle Richard bloody Mariner was here.

  Immediately at Ben’s right hand sat Ali, also looking into the radar bowl. Ready, one on either side of the door, were two more guards. Four in here. Now how many did his godfather have?

  “Hello, Uncle Richard. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to take you home, Ben.”

  “But I don’t want to go home, Uncle Richard. I want to stay here with my friends.” He put on the lunatic singsong voice, thinking like a fox.

  “But I’m afraid we can’t have that, Ben. They’re waiting for you at home.”

  Ben began to turn, slowly, looking out through the door at his back. “But who’ll be waiting, Uncle Richard? My mummy’s been dead so long…”

  At the far end of the corridor, he could see his enemy standing looking in. Mariner’s hands were by his sides, but he seemed to be holding a pistol. Ben squinted. It was a short corridor, but dark. The light was coming from behind Richard, where another corridor went across. Why, it was a Heckler and Koch MP-5. Now where did you get one of those? wondered Ben. Well, it doesn’t matter now.

  He raised his empty hands in a helpless, little-boy shrug. “My mummy’s been dead for so long,” he said. “And my father went down with your ship kill the bastard!”

  The two men behind the door spun out, guns ready. They understood the English word kill. Ali leaped up, grabbing for a gun as well, and all hell was let loose.

  Richard dived forward as the two men jumped into the door. Twelve Toes leaned round the corner above him and sprayed them with automatic fire. They didn’t stand a chance. As they fell, Richard was looking beyond them at the twisting shapes farther in. A slight figure sprang forward. Richard squeezed off three. The figure stopped where he was, as though his mind had changed. Then Twelve Toes lobbed a thunderflash into the room and dashed past Richard’s prone form. Richard picked himself up the instant after the explosion and leaped forward as though coming up out of sprinting blocks. They went in through the door shoulder to shoulder, firing as they went. Ben was thrown back against the radar and the gun he was holding flew away. Richard stood following his slow slide to the floor, every inch, with the MP-5. “Check him,” he said to Twelve Toes, and the gun didn’t move until he had.