The Fire Ship (25 page)

She reached the glass-paneled door through which she had released Bob and John and paused with her hand on the handle looking out. Darkness was snowing down. Physically. It was as though the blackness of the
sky had been broken into pieces like strange snowflakes and was settling here in a blizzard.

The helicopter was gone, the sound of its departure lost under the thunder.

Then the noise registered, and its significance, just as the weakened ceiling of the gym started to collapse under the weight of them.

“Locusts!” Fatima yelled at him. “It’s a plague of locusts!”

Ben stood, transfixed, looking up at them as the rays of the setting sun abruptly shone from beneath them. In that instant, the black, swirling mass of them was transformed into an infinity of burning dots. Wings flashed like sword blades catching the light, bodies glittered, hard-shelled legs glinted. Multifaceted eyes glowed. And the light vanished.

“They ate the light,” whispered Ben, awed by them.

But Fatima did not hesitate. She took him by his good arm and pulled him back inside. For she had seen what he had not. The locusts were coming down. Within an instant of the door closing behind them, the first massive grasshopper body thudded onto the thin, prefabricated roof above them. And that first, isolated noise was soon followed by others, pattering down onto the pale surfaces like the outriders of a storm.

They ran back down to the foreman’s office as quickly as Ben could go, strangely disturbed by the invasion of the creatures, but hardly counting them as having any effect on their plans. They could secure the doors and windows well enough. What did it matter to them what landed on the outside?

But as Ben had observed, the locusts had all but eaten the light. Already the tankers heading to and from Hor-
muz were almost invisible, except for on the radar. In fact, over all the Gulf it seemed, darkness gathered at the beck of the creatures until nothing remained visible except the last of the sunset on the upper works of one final tanker, coming west, out of sequence, farther south than all the others. Seemingly heading straight for the platform itself.

“Three miles. Can you see it now, Richard?”

“Barely, John. I’m looking straight into the sunset now, but it’ll be gone in another minute. There’s something else, though. I still can’t make it…”

The radio buzzed again. “Yes?”

“Locusts, Richard. It’s a huge cloud of locusts.”

“Asha. How’s Robin?” He asked almost automatically. Asha’s words had made scales drop from his eyes. As though he had put on spectacles, he saw what was happening clearly.

“She’s gone. The helicopter got clear.”

“Thank God.”

“The locusts are settling back here, though. The weight of them is making the gym cave in.”

Of course they would be settling! The thought appeared out of nowhere, The ship was green. The horde of insects probably thought it was edible.

He hit the deck lights. They flooded on. Their glare was soaked up by the swarm and the very air seemed to catch fire as their bodies reflected the beams.

“Two miles, Richard.”

Only eight times their length to go. “Guide me. The deck lights have helped, but I still can’t see. I’m going in blind.” His eyes whirled with the confusion of insect bodies dancing in front of him. They were all he could see; they were the last thing he needed to see. His right hand was like rock on the helm.

He thumbed
SEND
on his radio again. “Two miles,
Katapult.
Watch out for the locusts. Good luck.”

Fully laden,
Prometheus
rode low in the water, her deck only twenty feet above the surface. Only the narrowest part of her cutwater showed at the bow, cleaving through the flat sea at twenty knots. Fifty feet above the water, her white bridge-wings thrust out on either side, clear of the hull itself, overhanging it by ten clear feet. Above the bridge, another thirty feet of housing supported the tanker’s communications equipment, dishes, and aerials. Above that stood her funnel, the smoke it was giving out lost to view immediately among the clouds of locusts there. For a moment after the lights came on, the locusts hesitated. Only their weakest had settled so far, a curtain of bodies like a rain shower beneath the thunderheads of the swarm. Between the water and the mass of the locusts just above
Prometheus
’s funnel was about a hundred feet of uninfested air. The wind came relentlessly from the south at little less than gale force.

Katapult
darted out from behind the stern of the great tanker, shuddering in the force of the wind. As she heeled across the steady blast, her mast top came clear of the stratified bodies and she fitted into the low, clear air. Sails at full stretch, spinnaker billowing in front of her, she rode across the wind at twice the tanker’s speed, leaping down toward Fate. She would reach the platform in two roaring, thundering minutes while those aboard her prayed they could get in behind the terrorists as planned, while their attention was still on
Prometheus.

“She’s going to ram us!” yelled Fatima.

“It’s Mariner!” screamed Ben.

“Five minutes,” called Ali from the radar, computing her course and speed.

“Get the others, Fatima. Get them all.”

“But the hostages.”

“All right. Leave two guards. And one in the main control room. Get the rest. Get the guns. Get everything.”

In front of the manager’s office, the deck of the platform stretched forward across an area about the size of a tennis court before it ended in a low rail and an eightyfoot drop to the sea. It was designed as an observation area, nothing more, like the outside bridge-wings on
Prometheus.
Ben tore open the office door and ran out onto it without further thought. His feet skidded out from under him. His whole side tore agonizingly. He plunged headlong into a writhing, hopping, buzzing mass of insects. Howling with rage, he pulled himself up and stumbled forward to the rail. In an instant, he was alive with locusts. Like a living shroud they clustered round him, piling themselves precariously on his shoulders, even hanging, one layer upon another, down his back. Only his kaffiyah kept them out of his hair and face. Their feet scratched the skin on his hands as they crawled. He could feel the weight of them, caked thickly around him. The humming, buzzing thunder of them was overpowering. The dead, earthy stench of them like vermin droppings. The wind of their wings was more powerful than the south wind in this sheltered place. He skidded to a stop by the rail, lucky not to slither under it, and leaned forward with its crawling crosspiece at his waist. He had to keep shaking the binoculars to keep their slow, fat bodies off the lenses.

And there she was, low in the water. That was what had fooled him at first. Closing at flank speed, her bow coming straight toward him, a bone in her teeth, kicking up a bow wave like a cruiser. Then the blaze of
her deck lights with the hellish clouds of locusts dancing there, gathering on her, swarming over her, masking her lines and angles under curves of sandy, writhing, faintly glistening bodies. And her bridge-house. The white of it gone under the carapace of insects. The shape of it swollen, bloated, unwholesome. Only the windows uncovered. And behind the bridge windows, a glimpse of movement.

“I know you, you bastard. You’ve got the con yourself.”

A blow on the shoulder spun him round. He was confronted by a shapeless monster made up of twisting, writhing things. More shapes loomed, amorphous, in the humming gloom beyond.

The sound of hammering started and it took him a moment to realize that one of them was already firing at the ship. The others joined him at the rail, firing wildly. Ben shook his head with frustration—his kaffiyah stayed still and his cheeks moved unsettlingly against it—shooting an AK-47 at the forecastle head of a supertanker was as pointless as throwing stones. They needed their heaviest weapons giving concerted fire at the bridge if they were going to stop
Prometheus.
He doubted they had more than a couple of weapons powerful enough to do her serious damage at all. But they could kill the men and women aboard: they had more than enough for that.

“One mile. Keep her at that. Due west.”

“It’s bloody difficult to see anything at all. How many of these damn things do you suppose there are?”

“Millions.”

“Right. Remember. I don’t actually want to ram it.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Cutting speed now.” He rang down on the
engine room telegraph
ALL ASTERN.
The automatic equipment began to obey at once. It wouldn’t actually stop them for another five miles at this speed, but stopping wasn’t the real intention.

Suddenly, beyond the dancing brightness of the deck the forecastle head seemed to explode. Richard flinched, dazzled. A column of fire and smoke belched up fiercely from the head of his ship. “Here we go,” he said grimly. “That looked like a mortar round to me.”

“Three-quarters of a mile.”

Katapult
lay dead in the water under the southern side of Fate. Her spinnaker was down now and her sails were furled. The aerodynamic column of her mast rocked metronomically in the swell and as it did so, it almost touched the back of the platform. “Now!” yelled Salah, already on Fate, and C. J. Martyr jumped. He seemed to hang in the air for a moment between the masthead and the railings, but then the safe iron slammed into his chest and Salah’s strong hands gripped his shoulders until he scrambled over onto the still, flat metal of the deck. At once he turned, unlooping the rope from his shoulder and dropping its weighted end down to Weary’s waiting hands below. The locust infestation was not as heavy here, but still there was a layer of insects clinging to everything vertical and hopping on anything flat. The two men fought to disregard the almost nauseating sensation caused by the insects crawling on their skin as they went into their carefully planned routine. While Martyr was pulling up the first bundle of weapons from below, Salah scouted forward, checking their route. There seemed to be no guards on this side of the platform at all. Good. Richard’s diversion was working well. Now all they had to do was get the weapons up, find the hostages, and give one to the other.

He glanced down, surprised by the weight of the Heckler and Koch MP-5, and found it was completely hidden in an amorphous mass of insects reaching down in a club from his elbow. His skin crawled, as though the foul things were inside him as well as out.

Martyr pulled up the first bundle of weapons and dropped the line for the second. So far, so good, he thought.

The manager’s office had a flat roof that overlooked the observation platform where the mortar was. Up here, at an elevation slightly higher than the bridge windows that were its target, Ben put the general-purpose machine gun. It was the heaviest piece he had here apart from the mortar, but that only had four rounds left and it wasn’t big enough to be accurate down the length of the tanker’s deck. One lucky hit on the forecastle head had been enough to set it on fire, but the tanker was still powering toward them, chopping through the curtains of dancing insects. The blazing bows were a quarter of a mile away at most, halfway between here and the bridge. “Fire!” yelled Ben. He was so preoccupied, he spoke in English, but the meaning was clear enough. A bright line of 7.65mm tracer arced out toward the bridge-house less than half a mile away.

“One minute to impact,” sang out John.

Richard was already spinning the helm, able to see the platform quite clearly now, and able to judge things for himself.

He moved the engine-room telegraph from
FULL ASTERN
to
STOP
.

It had never been his plan to ram the rig. That would have been far too dangerous for all concerned. The mathematics were something he must work out when
he had leisure, but the force that would be released by the impact of a quarter of a million tons of water moving at twenty knots, with all its attendant momentum, against one immovable object like the platform would be colossal. It would certainly be enough to destroy Fate and all upon it. And probably the tanker too: her steel sides would be split apart like tissue paper.

Having taken the attention of the terrorists and held it while
Katapult
crept in, it was now his job to graze his ship gently along the platform’s side and try to do some damage with the overhanging bridge-wings.

“Thirty seconds!” called John.

The center of the deck between the Sampson posts erupted like a volcano and Richard, who had decided the mortar had ceased firing, jerked right back in shock. The movement saved his life, for just at that moment, the bridge windows exploded inward, and he was overwhelmed by tracer bullets, shards of glass, and whirring, panicked insects.

The tanker’s blazing forecastle head began to swing away. Fatima, crouching beside the mortar team, clapped her hands with relief, sending up a cloud of crippled insects. “Well done,” she yelled in raucous Arabic. “It’s time to try one more.”

Above her head the long hose of tracer reached out toward the bridge. As it moved in a lazy snake of light, so it cleared the air around it and the mortar was inundated with smoldering pieces of locust. But the air was clearing anyway: miraculously, it looked as though the whole swarm had settled on the tanker, seemingly forcing it down more deeply into the water by the weight of their deep-piled bodies. It was as though she had come through some living sandstorm, with great dunes piled high on her decks. Dunes whose every grain was
a locust. “Let’s put one right in the middle.
Now!
” she ordered. The round rattled down the tube and thumped onto the firing pin. They leaned back as the explosive lobbed it over the heads of the rest of the men, still firing their assault rifles from the railing in front.

The middle of the tanker’s deck burst open. The front of the bridge-house seemed to shiver as though a hurricane wind swept across it.

Prometheus
’s burning forecastle head began to swing back in.

The bridge was a shambles. The equipment at the front was in ruins from the combination of blast and tracer fire. The helm was in splinters. The only piece of equipment still functioning seemed to be the collision alarm radar, which was shrieking out its most urgent warning. There was glass everywhere littering the floor, the work surfaces, the chairs. Smoking tracer rounds, still red hot, lay on the deck. The radio was a total wreck. And everything was covered with locusts, most of them dying or dead.