The Fire Ship (13 page)

Even at this time of night, this was a busy place. For the first time in weeks Richard did not feel hot, for after a walk through the suffocating atmosphere outside, the chill of the air-conditioning on the concourse and in the shops was like a drug. Here, during the short time they had to wait, Richard emulated his wife’s good sense by purchasing clothing much more suited to the climate than his Western shirt and trousers. By the time C. J. Martyr had cleared passport control and customs, Richard looked more like a sheikh than a sailor with his long, white fine cotton djellabah, his kaffiyah, and his dark mahogany tan—though he still kept his old clothes, together with some other new ones in the bright bag marked
KHAM SIN, TAILORS.

When Martyr came striding out of customs and into Robin’s waiting arms, it was 11
P.M.
local time. In his head it was 4
P.M.
New York time precisely, and he was still full of fizz. His lean body seemed to spark with energy. He towered over Robin, sweeping her off her feet into an exuberant bearhug, and even topped Richard by an inch or two. If anything, over the last ten years he seemed to have grown younger. His sand gray crewcut had gained not one more fleck of white, his bony frame had gained not one more ounce of flesh. But the stark lines that had marked his hatchet face when they had all first met were gone, replaced by
laugh lines at his eye corners clustering thickly between long fair lashes and great jug-handle ears.

“Richard!” he boomed.

Richard strode forward, thinking how different this was from their first hostile greeting all those years ago. He took the proffered hand, feeling again the old strength still lurking in the long, hard muscles. The old power in the grasp of that great, hard-knuckled fist. They embraced the instant Robin was put down and stood, thumping each other on the back like long lost brothers.

Then, over Martyr’s shoulder, Richard saw another, slighter figure close behind. Golden hair drawn back into a simple ponytail that emphasized the beauty of the face and the elegance of the neck, though it was not designed to do so. Straight, slim nose between broad cheekbones. Generous mouth emphasizing her wide jaw. Enormous emerald eyes, as cold as her father’s were warm and smiling. Skin like honey, glowing and dusted with gold. Square shoulders, full breasts, slim waist, broad hips, legs that went on forever. The impact of her almost stopped his heart.

It was Christine.

He stepped back as though struck; then he paused, his mind a whirl of speculation and this time Robin acted, behaving as though this had always been part of their plans. “Christine!” Her voice echoed Richard’s thought even as he thought it and suddenly they were side by side, Robin’s blonde curls dulled by comparison with Christine’s flowing tresses. Beside the American beauty, Robin seemed shorter, plumper, coarser. Almost the ugly-duckling schoolgirl he had first met nearly twenty years ago. But it was only in comparison, for the effect had nothing to do with Robin and everything to do with Christine’s shining perfection. And after the
first breathtaking impact, the first unflattering comparison, it always warmed his heart to see how Robin simply enjoyed Christine’s company though she was as well aware as anyone how plain she looked beside her friend.

And, as it always did, Richard’s heart twisted with affectionate sympathy for the exquisite girl before him, living her lonely life. He strode forward, therefore, and swept the pair of them into his arms, hugging fiercely and protectively.

“What’s the plan?” was Martyr’s first question as they pulled their cases from the carousel. Richard silently shook his head and glanced meaningfully at the pair of khaki police uniforms patrolling nearby. Martyr’s eyebrows rose fractionally; then he became preoccupied with identifying his luggage.

As the four of them crossed the reception area, Robin earnestly began to discuss with Christine the advisability of emulating her own choice of clothing, but the American girl seemed content with what she had brought. Robin was for once caught off guard by her friend’s unconscious sexuality. Knowing Hood and Weary as she did, she really felt that Chris’s reliance on bikinis and SPF 7 was going to prove a challenge to all concerned. But how on earth could she put it in a way that Chris would accept?

Abruptly her mood swung and for the first time ever in the nine years of their friendship, she really did feel fat and dowdy in the presence of this vision of beauty. Fat and dowdy and pregnant. She caught the tail end of a strange man’s glance at the pair of them and knew he hadn’t even noticed her. Oh, why had C. J. brought his daughter now? Now of all times! Her head began to buzz with depression, fatigue, and sickness.

The automatic doors hissed open and closed behind
them. The night air swirled chokingly around her. The shadows attained substance and crushed against her like burning bodies. The stench of the oil, the tar, the car exhaust washed into her throat nauseatingly. The noises fell away as she became giddy with the shock of the heat. She tottered apart from the other three, and not even Richard noticed her distress. Her head spun. Her whole body was suddenly awash with sweat. This is very bad, she thought. Her knees gave. She fell.

And one of the shadowy bodies became real. One of the distant sounds said her name. Her moment of weakness was saved by steely strength and she found herself looking upward like the heroine of a popular romantic novel into the lean, proud face of a familiar desert warrior.

“Salah,” she whispered, and fainted into his arms.

Angus had found them a tidy thirty-footer, one of those craft Richard insisted on calling a “dhow” and everyone else called a launch. This launch was named
Alouette.
She had been built in the boatyards of the Creek at Dubai untold years ago and the only thing certain about her history was that she had once been owned by someone who had given her a French name. Her body was strong and watertight; shipshape, under her peeling paint; neat and tidy, if elderly. She had a high bow, falling in an exaggerated, elegant curve from a near-vertical bowsprit to a fine, sharp cutwater. Her forecastle was only a step or two above her maindeck, but it sloped up steeply toward her head. Her stubby mainmast stood at the center of her deck, along which lay the long crosspiece bearing her dull red sail. They would have no need of this, for, belowdeck, behind the mast, her engine room boasted a gleaming, perfectly maintained Perkins 4-236 diesel engine, complete with Hurth box transmission. At Richard’s first command from the bridge-house above the sterncastle, it kicked into steady motion and, as Robin spun the mahogany wheel, Salah and Angus cast off and they were away.

They set forth at dawn the next morning, the stuffy, overpowering darkness hesitating into lifeless gray for a moment; the gas flares paling in their flat galaxy north
across the water whither
Alouette
’s head was pointing. The sky became the palest blue arcing overhead, down to the shadow-line at its junction with the pallid water. The whole of the Gulf seemed to hold its breath with only the little launch throbbing purposefully through the stillness. Then the sun came up out of the sea, filling the water with fire. A tidal wave of light seemed to wash over them, its crest brushing the dome of heaven itself, and it was day: day as though the night had never been.

But the night had existed all right, and had been a busy one at that. They had not paused to greet Salah at the airport but instead rushed him and the still-fainting Robin to the coolness of the air-conditioned car. Once inside, she had revived rapidly as they sped south again, with Richard concentrating fiercely on the road ahead. As he tried vainly to come to terms with the local style of driving, so Robin began to describe the plans to the new arrivals.

It was more than five years since Salah Malik and C. J. Martyr had last seen each other and, bound though they were by the events on the first
Prometheus,
they had grown into virtual strangers. Chris automatically mistrusted anyone until he had earned her respect and affection. This process had taken Richard and Robin some years. The fact of Salah’s natural magnetism simply complicated matters for her. The American girl’s nightmarish youth had inverted all her priorities. The slightest attractiveness in a man brought out a legion of defenses in her. Which was why, Robin thought, it had taken her so long to accept Richard. She glanced affectionately at the back of her husband’s head and something about the way his hair curled made her tingle with desire.

Salah’s arm lay across the back of the front bench seat
and his knees swung in toward the gear shift as he turned to look back. Martyr sat behind him, and the women behind Richard. His eyes met Robin’s first and he smiled his old smile.

“I never thought you’d come, Salah,” she said. “It’s so dangerous for you.”

“It’s no problem. After Beirut, even death will be a relief, I think. I suppose that’s why there are so many so willing to die.”

His tone was difficult to gauge. Was it world-weary? Cynical? Merely ironic? All of a sudden, Robin became aware of the gap that had opened between them during the last years during which they had drifted apart.

“I thought you were a peaceful man,” said Martyr abruptly.

“And so I am, Chief.” Salah slipped easily back into the old ways. Martyr had not been a chief engineer for ten years.

“Then what are you doing in Beirut?”

“Looking for peace.”

“Have you looked for my father?” Robin asked. She had meant to be subtle, to come at it indirectly, in the diplomatic, English way. But her burning sense of urgency abruptly outweighed all her background and social conditioning. She realized that all that had held her back from hysteria since the news of the kidnapping was the pointlessness of indulging it.

“I have looked,” he answered gently. “Sir William is not there.”

“What?” Richard glanced across. “Are you certain?” He had taken his eyes off the road for a second at the worst possible moment, just as they came down off the causeway onto the first great roundabout in Manama. A yellow Chevrolet taxi sped past on the wrong side
and turned across their path, horn screaming. Richard swore and stamped on the brakes. Half a ton of German steel stopped dead in the road. They were thrown around like puppets inside, but Salah had a firm grip on the seat back and a hand on the dashboard too. “Go!” he snapped and Richard did to the accelerator what he had just done to the brake and they hurled into a transient hole. “Hit the horn,” suggested Salah mildly, “and you’ll fit right in.” Richard did, and the car, mercifully unscathed, blended perfectly into the shrieking mass of traffic. So that the gaze of the policeman Salah had been watching passed incuriously over them, apparently noting nothing unusual.

The Palestinian repeated his assertion quietly in Angus’s office ten minutes later. “Sir William is not in Beirut. I know where the other hostages are and I am doing all in my power to help them. But no one in Beirut has Sir William, or has any part in this that I can discover. I am afraid we may have to look farther east.”

“Iran,” whispered Robin.

“It is hard to tell at the moment. Things are so confused there.”

“So you are not sure?” Angus tugged at his beard, lost in thought.

“No, I am not. You have tried asking questions in the Soukh?”

“I have. Nothing.”

“The Creek, of course? The boatyards there have always been full of gossip.”

“The Creek—indeed the whole of Dubai—has nothing to say to me. And as for Kor Rass al Kaimah, the Mujara, Ash Sharq, Al Khalida, it is the same: all the markets, ports, and docks on this side of the Gulf are silent on the subject.”

“But damn it!” exploded Robin. “Someone must know something.”

“Agreed,” answered Salah mildly. “But who? And where?”

“What I know is this,” grated Richard. “We have precious little time to sit around and wait for news. Our first job is to get
Prometheus
back. If the two incidents are connected we will then have a counter to bargain with. If they aren’t, we will have freed both Crewfinders and Heritage Mariner from their present position and can get on and find him no matter what it costs.”

“That’s right!” Martyr could sit still no longer. He was up and pacing, seven hours less exhausted than they, like a sober guest late at a boozy party. “So we go after
Prometheus
first. When and how?”

“Dawn Sunday. We need some time to prepare.”

“Right. What does your preparation entail?”

Richard explained the situation: They needed better intelligence. They needed more arms.

“Intelligence?” rapped Martyr.

“Team one. Robin, Angus, Salah, and me. Angus found us a dhow…”

“Launch.”

“…A launch, thank you, Angus. We will go up to Bushehr. We check on
Prometheus
’s position. See if we can get close enough to learn anything more.”

“And if she’s not there anymore?” asked Robin.

“Back here at once and pray for news of her.”

“Okay,” said Martyr. “That’s team one. Team two?”

“On
Katapult.
You, Chris, Hood, and Doc. You’ll pick Hood up with the supplies and go out to
Katapult
when we’re finished here. Your job is to run down to Fujayrah. When you get down there you’ll find an explo-
sives dumping ground. It’s marked as deep water on the chart, but there’s a ridge. Here, let me show you…”

The run up to Bushehr was 190 miles.
Alouette
was capable of eight knots. She had a gently following wind and no currents of the tideless Gulf chose to run against her. They made the crossing in twenty hours, therefore, arriving at 02:00 next morning, four hours before dawn.

Since crossing into the Iranian and Iraqi exclusion zones, Richard and Robin had kept watch and the others had slept, ready to be roused at a moment’s notice in case of trouble. It was easy enough to find the place, even at 02:00 in the dark with rudimentary navigation aids, because Bushehr Airport remained active on their starboard and Kharg, on their distant port, was all abustle. The coast from Rass osh Shatt, round the bay to Bushehr itself, was flat and shelved shallowly into the sea. Nearly five miles out they hit the ten-meter mark on the sounder, chucked the anchor over, and went to bed. Things were likely to get busier after dawn, so some rest was needed now.

The brightness woke Richard an instant after sunrise and he opened his eyes to slits. He found himself lying on
Alouette
’s teak decking, curled round Robin. Beyond her still-sleeping form, he could see an apparently thin strip of water, then the desert, reaching from the tide line to seeming infinity away in the heart of Iran. There was no scrub or grass visible, no vegetation at all that he could see—simply an ocher slope of sand rising gently out of the water until it attained a low plain that stretched monotonously away. There were mountains in the far distance, he knew, the southern ranges of the Zagroz with Shiraz at their heart, but they were far out
of sight. All that seemed real was that distant, featureless plain, dominating the land and dictating the nature of the sea. A morning wind stirred, bringing the brimstone stench of it to his nostrils, together with enough fine sand grains to start him sneezing. So he sat up, took the headdress he had been using as a pillow and wrapped it round his head and face like any Arab would. When he stood, no eye on earth could have distinguished him from a million men dressed alike in a long white shirtlike djellabah and a bright checked kaffiyah. It was only when he called out excitedly in English that the illusion was shattered.

“Robin! There she is! My God, how could we have been so close without knowing?”

Prometheus
lay at anchor less than a mile away. They were dead astern so that the length of her was eaten by perspective, but there was no doubting her scale. Even here, the clifflike hugeness of her was so overpowering that Richard was surprised he had felt nothing of it during the night, or while he was looking away across the desert just now.

She was sitting high, the great fin of her rudder alone enough to dwarf
Alouette
—perhaps even
Katapult
herself. Behind it, idle but boasting massive power, stood the blades of her twin propellers, like the rudder rising out of the still water to reveal only part of their true scale. Then, above these, the hull itself, rearing up and back in a colossal overhang. And on it was written clearly in white across her stern:
PROMETHEUS II LONDON.

Instinctively, not a little awed by her, they spoke in whispers—they would have taken care in any case after Richard’s first, surprised exclamation, for they did not want English accents to carry across the still water.

“Well, there she is, just where Admiral Stark said she would be,” said Richard, first to gather his thoughts.

“No sign of life aboard,” observed Salah.

“And she wasn’t showing lights last night or we’d have seen her,” added Robin, her voice heavy with disapproval.

“That’s dangerous,” said Angus, angrily.

“Bloody lethal. Lucky we weren’t a mile farther that way last night or we’d have sailed straight into her. Stupid sods.” Robin was not at her best in the morning. After having delivered herself of this opinion, she vanished toward the low sterncastle.

“But what to do next,” mused Richard. “What to do.”

“You’re the boss,” said Angus. “We do what you say.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Salah. “But I know what I’d do. I’d try to get aboard.”

“Yes,” said Richard. “That’s obviously our next objective now we’re here. But how to start…”

“What would we do if we were just a bunch of fishermen out from Bushehr?” asked Angus.

“Sail right up and say hi?” ventured Salah, voice wavering between doubt and excitement.

“Damned if I wouldn’t!” said Richard decisively.

“You mean just sail right up to them and see what happens?” Angus seemed less pleased with the simple plan.

“At least it has the merit of the direct approach,” observed Richard. “And it’ll save a lot of time.”

“We’re here to save lives, not time,” countered Angus. “Starting with our own lives.”

“True. So, we’ll have to think this through carefully, step by step. Now, could we actually have come from Bushehr?”

“In a smallish launch?” Angus said. “No reason why not. It’s why we settled on this type of craft after all.”

“But not,” struck in Salah suddenly, “in a launch with
a French name. Not from Bushehr. The Iranians aren’t calling boats by any names the mullahs mightn’t like at the moment. And they aren’t writing them in that sort of lettering.”

Out of nowhere at that moment, the name of the burning ship on that lost radio message sprang into Richard’s memory. It was amorphous, slightly out of focus, a serpentine puzzle of lines. But he thought he might be able to put it on paper fairly accurately. Salah might know what it meant. But he thrust the thought away as soon as it occurred to him. They had more important matters at hand. “Right,” he said. “So we’re not from Bushehr, or anywhere else in Iran. Where are we from?”

“Not too close by,” decided Salah. “We didn’t see them last night, but they might have seen us. We were carrying lights, remember.”

“Okay,” agreed Angus. “Then where’s closest on the
far
side of the Gulf? Somewhere in Kuwait, I guess.”

“Mina al Ahmadi and Al Mish’ad are both a hundred and fifty miles away,” said Richard, his eyes closed, consulting the chart in his head. “Nothing closer of any size.”

“Well, I can speak with a Kuwaiti accent,” said Angus more happily. “That’s no problem. But what are we doing here?”

Robin came rushing back at that moment, her vivid eyes alight with pleasure. “Have you seen them?” she asked at once. “Aren’t they lovely?” The others had no idea what she was talking about, so she took them back to see.