The Fire Ship Read online

  THE FIRE

  SHIP

  PETER TONKIN

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  In Its Fatal Grip

  Katapult pirouetted madly out of control. She spun into the tanker’s wake, outriggers threatening to tear themselves out of the water. The blade of the mainsail swung this way and that, threatening to rip its boom out of the mast. And, with a sound like a whiplash, the foresail tore free and flew overboard until brought up short by the last ten feet still firmly attached to the far end of the forward telescopic boom. The whole mast shivered to come down and only the steel shrouds held it together.

  The bulk of the tanker, less than forty feet away now, began to suck at the helpless craft. It had created a vacuum in both wind and water because of its massiveness and already Katapult was slewing over toward the suction of the thrashing propeller blade, preceded by the billowing dacron of the foresail. In all too few moments, it seemed, first the sail and then the craft herself would be sucked in and pulled under and chopped to bits…

  For Cham and Guy

  Epigraph

  Fire Ship: A vessel freighted with combustibles and explosives and sent among ships, etc., to destroy them

  First used 1588, Oxford English Dictionary

  Out of the fired ship—which by no way

  But by drowning could be rescued from the flame—

  Some men leaped forth

  and ever as they came

  Near the foe’s ships, did by their shot decay.

  So all were lost which the ship were found—

  They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drowned.

  (Slightly adapted by the author)

  John Dunne 1572-1631

  poet, scholar,

  sometime rector of Sevenoaks

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  In Its Fatal Grip

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Praise

  Other Books By Peter Tonkin

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Indian Ocean. Lat. 10° N, Long. 55° E.

  She came down from the horizon burning, pulled south across the wind by the current. She came like a ghost through a haze that the monsoon could not move. A haze that twisted her, made her seem liquid, like a slow drop of tar in a furnace running over corrugated iron.

  She belched smoke and the monsoon pushed it back along her track. Every now and then it would settle wearily, to lie black and oily on the upper ocean, leaving an ugly, unnatural wake stretching roughly northward, up toward Socotra, mile after mile. Such were the vagaries of that thick wind that the smoke stayed low, as if forbidden the upper reaches, so that from a distance it remained invisible and the one thing to be seen coming over the horizon, looming out of that silver haze, was that implacable black hulk, burning, oozing southward, moved by the current alone.

  “There she is!” called Robin, who had the keenest eyes of the four of them. Then, “No, but…”

  “Yes!” confirmed Richard at once, seeing the burning freighter in the blinding distance.

  “Dead ahead,” chimed in Hood, shading his eyes with a square, black hand.

  “Steady as we go, then,” concluded Weary, who held the great spoked helm, the four of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit, looking forward.

  Katapult skimmed northward like a gull, a thing of the wind, immune, unlike the other ship, to the rogue current running counter.

  “Better tell him we can see him,” commanded Richard and Weary together, then the Englishman, Richard, turned away with a self-deprecating grin, unused to the fact that he was not in command here. The Australian, Weary, finished the command without pause: “Tell the freighter we have him in sight, Sam.”

  Sam Hood nodded his understanding, his strong brown fingers already busy at the transmitter. He had broadcast at frequent intervals during their approach, ever since they picked up the first “Mayday!” twelve hours ago, but had received little beyond the distress calls, and, since noon, nothing. “Think there’s anyone left aboard?” Robin asked abruptly, her clipped English tones drowning Hood’s drawl. Richard shrugged and put a broad hand on her shoulder, sharing her concern in silence.

  “Soon find out,” answered Weary. “She’s coming down on us fast enough.”

  They were running across the wind, at an angle calculated by Weary to bring them in on this tack. Richard Mariner, a sailor since his late teens and a senior captain these twenty years and more, marveled again at the ease and speed of the craft. Katapult. Her name was a play on words. “Kat” for her multihull configuration and “Katapult” for her speed. But she was neither catamaran nor trimaran—more like something in between. She had a long, needle-sleek hull with two submerged outriggers to stabilize the reach of her mast and the weight of her sails. A computer monitored the course, the angle and force of the wind of those great, ribbed sails, then dictated the horizontal angle of the outriggers to the hull so that Katapult always moved with maximum velocity and minimum draft unless the hand at the helm dictated otherwise. She was as experimental as she was beautiful and had fascinated Richard and Robin when they first saw her so entirely that they would have arranged a trial sail in her somehow, even had their holiday plans on Silhouette Island not changed so dramatically.

  Hood glanced up at his friend and colleague, the Australian, Doc Weary. “No answer, Doc,” he said. “Either there’s no one aboard, or they can’t hear us.”

  Weary’s massive head tilted back as the Australian squinted up past the curved white blade of the mainsail to the communications aerial, extending the broad aerofoil mast nearly eighty feet above. Of all the high-tech equipment onboard, Doc seemed least happy with that, thought Richard. Perhaps because it was about the only part of Katapult neither he nor Hood had built.

  “ ‘S all still there,” he informed Hood, his flat tone and Sydney accent in marked contrast to the American’s. “They must have heard you.”

  They were an odd pair, mused Richard. Held together by bonds so deep that neither he nor Robin—who was so much better at that sort of thing—had been able to fathom them. They were both big men, but apart from their size, Sam Hood and Doc Weary presented a complete contrast. Hood was an automobile-assembly-line worker from Detroit. He seemed to have little formal education, but his fingers understood all things mechanical and electrical from the simplest motor to the most complex microprocessor. Doc also fitted no conventional pattern. His long fair mane, bound back from his forehead by an apparently immovable sweatband, seemed to enlarge an already massive head. Sitting foursquare on his thick neck and broad torso, it gave an impression of huge physical power at odds with the delicacy of those artistic hands and the fastidious intellect that guided them. Robin had managed to discover, though neither man boasted of the fact, that Weary had earned his nickname because he had been the only Ph.D. in his platoon in Vietnam, where Weary and Hood had first met.

  Robin.

  At the thought of her, Richard, smiling, turned his gaze across to his vital, beloved wife. She stood, reedthin, f
ive feet eight inches of vibrant energy, blonde, almost luminescent in the brightness. The intensity of his feeling for her filled him to bursting, as it often did, though Richard, perfectly English in this as in most things, rarely put his emotions on parade. She was concentrating absolutely on the black hulk of the freighter. The sight of the ship was now so important because her radio remained silent. Richard put all other thoughts from his mind and followed his wife’s gaze. Were there any crewmen scaling down the hot black cliffs of her sides? Was there wreckage around bearing survivors? Were there lifeboats nearby? Which parts of her were ablaze? Was there anything clearly warning of danger—more than was apparent from her condition? Both he and Robin had painfully acquired experience in this field nearly ten years ago now—they had abandoned the first ship they had served on together, the supertanker Prometheus, when it had caught fire in these latitudes on the other side of Africa.

  As far as Richard could see, this ship was an utterly undistinguished tramp. She was of the timeless “three castle” design with raised sections fore and aft and a bridge-house midships. She seemed ageless: Conrad could have sailed in her—but no one else ever would. Much of the forecastle head, he now could see, was blown away. Her old-fashioned, nearly vertical bow rose from the restless sea perhaps ten sheer, sharp feet to a wreck instead of a point. Twisted metal reached out as though the forecastle were bursting into flower. No mere collision could have done that. Farther back in the well of the foredeck, black smoke collected, solid enough, seemingly, to be contained by the deck rails and to pile itself up the bridgefront before sliding sluggishly overboard. The bridge-house was a mess. Originally white, it was now a ghastly gray. Behind windows gaping between shards of shattered glass, flames flickered madly. The wind down which Katapult was riding pushed the smoke back above it all like thick, oily black hair. The clarity with which that gray death mask was revealed allowed Richard a shock of realization. His generation of Englishmen had been to war only briefly, in the Falklands, but he knew its effect well enough. He called, “Hood! She’s been strafed. Check the radar for planes.”

  “No planes visible,” said Robin. “Not that you’d see them in this.”

  “Not till they hit you,” agreed Weary, knowledgeably.

  “Nothing up there,” announced Hood almost immediately.

  “Something down here, though,” observed Richard grimly, gesturing with a broad, callused hand. The water between the two vessels was alive with sharks.

  “I’ve never seen so many,” whispered Robin.

  Abruptly, Hood was beside her. She gasped as he produced a handgun. He leaned over and shot one between the eyes. The gray spade of its forehead exploded. The great fish fell away slowly, turning its empty skull from side to side, as though yet unaware that it was dead. It had enough life left in it to strike back at the first attacker that followed the trail of blood down. The two creatures writhed together obscenely, the jaws of each fastened in the flank of the other. More sharks charged in.

  Smooth as a machine, Hood drew a bead on another.

  “No!” The cry of disgust came from Robin. The writhing knot of tearing, torn flesh—all that remained of the first two sharks—was still in sight and she would will such a terrible fate on no other living thing. No matter how loathsome the vicious predators were, she could not let Hood continue to exterminate them for his own gratification…But she hesitated on the thought, already suspecting the truth. Hood ignored her. Another shot. Robin flinched. Richard’s arm went round her shoulders instantly. “It’s the only way,” he said, giving words to her thought as he so often did. As though reading her mind.

  She understood the American’s plan as Richard spoke, of course, and might have felt like kicking herself except that she still felt in the right. As though a secret signal had been broadcast, the fins that had been cruising dangerously between them and the ship were now all heading purposefully toward that place—well astern now—where Hood had shot the sharks. Abruptly, the water there heaved itself up, boiling bloodily. Feeding frenzy had become mad slaughter.

  Robin turned and looked forward at the freighter now towering above them. The rumble of its burning drowned out the terrible sounds of the sharks’ self-destruction.

  “No use looking for anything smaller than lifeboats after this,” said Weary, his voice strained.

  “Ain’t that a fact,” agreed Hood flatly. “No one in the water would’ve stood a chance.”

  He was right, of course. And he had acted not a moment too soon, for even as he spoke, Weary spun the wheel, taking the way off Katapult. In one motion, even before she could begin to wallow, he hit the sail-furl buttons and gunned the engine, guiding her delicately over the last few yards toward the burning freighter. With a quiet whine, automatic motors began to furl the sails safely inside the mast. Two booms, one fore and one aft, telescoped obligingly inward.

  If the tramp had seemed sinister drifting, dead, down on them, this was nothing compared to the air of desolation she gave off close-to. There was a taste to her that sat far back in their throats. Smoke clawed at them, so Weary turned to run parallel rather than pass under the reeking shadow of her stern.

  This close, it was possible to feel the heat she was giving off. The afternoon was stultifying in any case, but as Katapult turned and began to run parallel to her starboard side, their skin began to glow with the added heat she was emitting: the most palpable expression of the danger she presented.

  But this close, the sight of her had more horrors to offer. A pocked rash of bullet strikes spread across the darkness of her whole hull. Invisible until now, a ragged mouth had been blown at the foot of the bridge-house. Above the gaping steel lips of this massive wound dangled the pathetic splinters of a lifeboat, destroyed on its davits. Halfway down her length, some of the crew had obviously tried to abandon. A long line angled back, its upper end snagged on the deck railing, its lower end dragging the torn, half-eaten wreck of an inflatable liferaft. More terribly still, hanging vertically from beside the tangled line on the deck rail, was a rope ladder. The last good rung hung a man’s length above the sullen water. Beneath that hung another, stained, bitten in half. The dark metal beneath it was scraped and scratched and splattered.

  It was chilling to imagine the fate of the last people who had used this route, but if anyone from Katapult were going aboard, the ladder would give the easiest access. Used to positioning his craft precisely, even with her unwieldy outriggers, Weary swung the wheel and snugged her stern beneath the last good rung. As soon as he did so, the other three jumped up out of the cockpit and onto the after-section of Katapult’s deck. Too large to be a mere lazarette, the after-section contained the lightweight engine and steering gear as well as much of the yacht’s storage space. The deck above it was a series of hatches laid flush and tight so that it was easy for anyone surefooted to cross over it. There was, for added safety, a low rail around it.

  Richard, Robin, and Hood together made for the stern and paused there. Hood caught the ladder and tugged it. Richard reached his shoulder, then glanced up. It occurred to him at last to hail the ship. Until now they had all been stunned into silence by her.

  But he didn’t know her name: it was gone off the wrecked forecastle, it was obliterated by the lethal smoke oozing over her stern. “Hello the ship!” he cried up, his voice all but buried under the sullen rumble of her burning. “Is there anyone aboard?”

  But even as he and Hood hesitated, a slim, strong body sprang past them. Robin, lighter and far more agile than they, swarmed up toward the deck. Richard automatically, used to her intrepid ways, gave her a hand up and then froze, riven with horror as he remembered—they were onboard Katapult instead of scuba diving in the Seychelles because she was pregnant with their first child.

  She had informed him on Silhouette, largest of the Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, on the first night of their first real holiday in years. They were here to go diving and it suddenly occurred to her that there might be a risk to the
baby if they did so.

  They had seen Katapult anchored off the island, on the second day. Entranced by her, they had tracked down Hood and Weary at once. The shipbuilders had been conducting trials on Katapult almost lazily, after years of scrimping, saving, designing, and planning to build her. They were not really interested in taking passengers for pleasure cruises and had already turned down several offers. But Robin and Richard were different. Not only was it obvious that the sea ran in them; not only was it clear that the powerful Englishman and his dazzling wife were a team of unusual competence—they were completely different from everyone else Hood and Weary had met. And the difference lay in who they were, not what. They were Heritage Mariner, one of the largest independent shipping fleets in Europe. Their quiet English tones spoke for enormous wealth, almost unimaginable power in the international shipping world.

  And Heritage Mariner had been looking for ways to broaden its base for years. Perhaps by going into pleasure craft, if a suitable design could be found. And now it had. If Heritage Mariner went into production with Katapult, Hood and Weary would be wealthy men. So Robin and Richard had put their diving gear into Katapult’s lazarette and moved their suitcases into the forward cabin—easily big enough to sleep four—and pitched in with a will. Katapult had taken to them: four was the perfect number to crew her. They tested the vessel with increasing awe in a long run northwest across the Indian Ocean. The voyage had been almost idyllic until Hood picked up that first faint “Mayday!” in the dead hours before dawn this morning.

  Abruptly Robin’s face appeared at the rail above the ladder. “It’s not too bad up here,” she called. “Better than I expected. Can’t see anyone about, though.”

  “Wait there,” called Richard. “I’m on my way up.”

  But she had turned away before his foot reached the first rung, and by the time he reached the deck she was gone.