The Fire Ship Read online

  Richard paused, looking around. He stood in a well between the back of the bridge-house and the bulk of the sterncastle—a couple of hundred square feet of splintered planking raised here and there into hatches. Aft of the well deck, two sets of steps rose ten feet astride a series of sagging, broken doors. The poop deck was worse, from what Mariner could see—the hatches up there were belching smoke like the bridge-house and the forward areas, but the wind that had brought Katapult here was still pulling most of it away to the north. Richard was standing in one of the few areas aboard that were relatively clear. Even so, there was a stench strong enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  “Robin?” he called, but his deep voice was lost in the sullen roaring that made the deck vibrate like a drumskin beneath his feet.

  “Where she at?” asked Hood suddenly at Richard’s shoulder.

  “Dunno.”

  “Hokay…” The tall American hesitated, very well aware that Richard’s instinct was to go in search of her. Hood never had much of a family life, but he had vivid memories of a quiet father and a strong, cheerful mother who had loved and supported him until the car crash that only he had survived. The rock-solid strength he remembered in his long-lost family he recognized in Richard and Robin Mariner.

  Richard Mariner stood six feet four, strong and straight-backed. His black hair had a hint of gray at the temples—a sign of age belied by the agile vigor of his frame. It was a tanned, fit-looking face, a tan acquired in vigorous outdoor life, not on some sunbed in a health club. And, Sam Hood guessed shrewdly, the flat belly and broad chest resulted, like his own lean strength, from exercise that had purposes beyond mere fitness.

  The power of the Englishman was held in check now by the only cause that could make him hesitate: he was calculating the action best designed to help his wife.

  Robin Mariner was a woman such as Hood had rarely seen. Keen intelligence coupled with a physical strength every inch the match of her husband’s. The beauty of her youth had lasted through to her midthirties. She had the physical grace and inexhaustible energy of a woman in her first flowering. The gamin charm bestowed by the windswept, salt-curled hair suited her exactly even though it hardly seemed to equate with the reality that she was a full ship’s captain, with all the papers to prove it.

  All in all, they were a startlingly unusual pair. No, not a pair—a unit: two halves of one being, bound together at the soul, like twins. Not even the distance unconsciously created by their Englishness and their total absorption with each other could disguise that.

  “She’ll be all right,” Hood prompted, unaware that Richard’s concern was not for his wife as much as for the unborn child she carried. “She knows what she’s doing.”

  Richard started talking suddenly, to cover his anxiety. “She fell off a supertanker once,” he said, coming to life again. “Went down to a wrecked felucca looking for a sick child screaming down there. Turned out to be a parrot, not a child at all.” He moved forward, ice blue eyes busy, toward the bridge-house. “The felucca was stuck on the front of my ship Prometheus. Collided in the night and wedged there. She heard the screaming. She went aboard. Felucca fell off.”

  He gestured toward the only door nearby. They crossed toward it knowing it would lead them up to the bridge.

  “She knew what she was doing then, too, but she was lucky to survive.”

  He opened the door.

  “Saved the parrot; would have saved the child, if there’d been one.”

  In front of them was a short passageway leading forward to a corridor. There was a door immediately on their left, open to an empty room; tables and chairs in disarray, as though recently, rapidly deserted.

  “Like the Marie Celeste,” observed Hood.

  “I don’t think the Marie Celeste was strafed by aircraft,” countered Richard.

  “True.” The conversation was automatic. Neither Richard nor Hood was really attending to it.

  They moved forward to the corridor, then followed it left as it turned into the shadowed, stultifying bowels of the bridge-house until they came to a stairwell. An elevator shaft gaped before them, doors wide and car gone, leaving a pendant tangle of cable lit by fire from below. The bottom of the stairwell glowed and rumbled as though a volcano were active down there. They glanced meaningfully at each other and ran on up toward the bridge itself.

  The bridge was a deserted wreck. The totality of the destruction told of terrible carnage. The windows were gone, blasted in with the helm and all the consoles that should have stood forward, overlooking the bows. Now they lay scattered against the torn, bullet-pocked rear wall. It was difficult to distinguish among the smoking wreckage on the floor what was oil and what was blood; what was wiring and what was entrails.

  There should have been a chart table. There should have been logs. There were only dark-stained rags and smoldering splinters. Twisted lumps of lead slid among the mess they had made. The whole place smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” whispered Richard.

  “No,” breathed Hood. “I did two full tours in Nam and I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

  As they searched the bridge they began to reconstruct what must have happened, from the unexpected, lowlevel airborne attack to the intrepid collecting of the dead and wounded—and the launching of the two largest lifeboats onto the deadly, shark-infested sea. Two lifeboats that should be out there somewhere, back along the ghostly, smoke-born track of the dying freighter’s wake. By the time they reached the main deck again, they were both determined to do all in their power to rescue the people who had been through this. What sort of officers and crew had the awesome discipline under this withering attack to remove each other, themselves, and all their records so completely? But there was nothing anywhere to give a clue to their identity—or that of their ship.

  Nor was there any sign of Robin.

  “Risk the foredeck?” asked Richard, at the top of the stairway down to the furnace in the engine room.

  Hood nodded. Both men were too well aware that the fire down below was burning more fiercely now than it had been when they first came aboard. But such was the mystery that both were compelled to continue. No ship about legitimate business with a normal crew could ever be as anonymous as this.

  Robin was in the sterncastle: here the crew had left more of themselves. The sterncastle itself was a warren of corridors, quarters, and storerooms, reaching one full level up from the well of the main deck then down three—maybe four decks—to the after engineering sections. These were as fiercely ablaze as the sections beneath the bridge, and Robin was as well aware as the men that the fire was getting worse.

  Two decks down toward the dead engines and Robin was drenched in sweat and choking from the fumes. The walls were hot and beginning to blister; the coconut matting on the floor gave off dangerous-looking little puffs of smoke when stepped on. The stairs themselves were far too hot to touch. She would not have risked going farther down even had she thought anyone could still have been alive down there.

  Up she came toward main deck level, therefore, contenting herself with searching quarters that must have belonged to engineers. She found overalls. She found rags, scarves, and kaffiyah headcloths. She found a copy of the Koran.

  It had been a Muslim crew then; Muslim engineers at least. But who would attack with such savagery a ship full of Muslims in the northern waters of the Indian Ocean?

  Who and why?

  She paused, lost in thought but uneasily aware that she was taking an unjustified risk. A personal adventure, away even from Richard for a little. Perhaps her last like this forever, right at the edge where she loved to be once in a while, with nobody at risk but herself.

  Except for her unborn child.

  That was the rub. She had started planning names already for the eight-week-old fetus lying so comfortably inside her, a pastime that warned her that she would soon have to give up the only drug she had ever really enjoyed—adrenaline
.

  Ah well, she thought wistfully, time to move.

  She was in one of the cabins overlooking the afterdeck. There was a small window, its glass crunching under her feet, overlooking a small drop onto the wood outside, and then, forty-odd feet away, the back of the bridge-house. Beneath the window was the deck on which the Koran had lain, beside it, a bunk. At the foot of the bunk, a cupboard covering part of the wall and at right angles to that, the door out onto the stairway.

  And even as she turned to exit, tapping the holy book tucked safely in her pocket, the stairwell exploded into flame.

  The door had opened outward: the force of the explosion slammed it shut, then set it rattling thunderously in its frame.

  All this happened so suddenly that Robin took a step backward, surprised, then walked toward the door with no real sense of danger. Even the noise it was making seemed hardly real. It was only when she touched its metal handle and burned her fingers that she really registered the fact that the stairwell outside was full of fire.

  Still far from panicking, she crossed to the desk and looked out of the window. Yes. She could get through that. And suddenly the need to do so was borne upon her most forcefully. The farthest port of the hatches in the deck before her suddenly erupted into flame.

  The window was big enough for her to get out of but it was fanged with stumps of thick glass. And it was early in the day, she reckoned, to deliver little Charlotte or William by cesarean section. Still, that was easily taken care of. She tore the mattress off the bunk and bundled it through the hole until it folded down over the glass. She should be able to slip through quite easily. Over the chair and onto the desk she moved, only to pause. It would be safer still if she had something outside to step down onto. Had she time to arrange that? The practiced eye of a fearless tomboy youth informed her that it would be an easy jump. Was she fussing too much? How roughly could you treat an unborn infant almost two months old?

  She turned to look for something that would fit through the window and still be solid enough to step down onto. That was when she noticed the blue flames licking in round the corners of the wooden door and the realization finally hit her that if she didn’t move fast, then she could die here.

  The forward deck was just as much of a mess as the bridge had been. The planes had come in low and the forecastle had taken the brunt. Richard and Sam picked their way through the mess quickly and carefully, eyes everywhere for clues. They stopped at the gaping top of what must once have been a safely battened hatch. The first few feet of ladder going down into the hold were in much the same condition as the last few feet of the ladder going down the side. Hood crouched down to check it and Richard found an instant’s leisure to look at his watch, the battered old steel Rolex given to him nearly fifteen years ago by Rowena Heritage. Rowena: Robin’s elder sister—Richard’s first wife. It was twelve minutes since Robin had disappeared. He went cold, fearing he knew not what.

  Then Hood interrupted: “Okay. Let’s go,” and the two of them went down together.

  Richard stepped down off the ladder into water. It was not deep—just enough to flood his canvas docksider shoes—but it was hot. It was absolutely dark down here, the ship’s lighting having died with her generators long-since. Sam Hood’s deep drawl came out of a nearby shadow, “We don’t find a flashlight in five seconds, I’m outta here.”

  There was one clipped to the ladder at shoulder height. Richard switched it on and they found themselves surrounded by wooden crates stencilled in a range of scripts from Cyrillic through Roman to Arabic.

  “See anything in English?” asked Sam.

  “Not a thing.”

  “What d’you reckon?”

  “Open one quickly…”

  Both men were bellowing over the roar, choking with every deep breath on increasingly acrid fumes. But the boxes were important. They had to be. Nobody strafed an unimportant ship. Therefore the planes were after the crew or the passengers. Or the cargo.

  It was the cargo. The first crate they opened proved it. “Heavy ordnance,” opined Sam.

  “Beyond me. Never seen anything like it.”

  “Dangerous stuff.” Sam was ferreting in among the packing now. “Damn! Richard! This’s a guided missile.”

  Richard was in action at once. The markings on the box, in Cyrillic, made no sense to him but they formed a recognizable pattern. It was repeated. Many times. “What d’you think, Sam?”

  “I think we’d better get out of here, fast.”

  “Let’s just check for documentation first. Anything on paper!” But an increasingly rapid search produced nothing. After five minutes the hot water was halfway to Richard’s knees and he had had enough. “Okay, Sam. Time to go!” And find Robin on the way, he thought to himself; though please God she was safely off already.

  Behind the tiny cabin’s smoldering door, wedged into a corner, was a tall cupboard that had not yet really attracted Robin’s interest. She crossed to it now, however, her mind racing. There might be something—anything—to help her get safely through that window. She tore the door open and a box the size of a child’s coffin toppled out toward her. She screamed and jumped back, allowing it to fall with a hollow thud down onto the floor. Her muscles refused to move until her suddenly sluggish brain had worked out what it was. It was nearly five feet long and two square. There was a hemp rope loop at each end. There was a catch padlocked shut halfway along it. It looked like a gun box to her.

  It would do. Without further thought, she took the rope at the nearest end and pulled it toward her. The box lifted easily but proved to be heavy and unwieldy. Only desperation gave her the strength to get it up onto the table so that it leaned on the mattress. Then it was easy enough to slide it up onto the window frame and guide it down onto the deck outside. She leaned out of the window and invested a few more seconds in tilting the box until it fell safely onto its side.

  She had followed it up until she was standing on the desk and she turned sideways now, hesitating no longer. She hunched herself over and slid astride the window frame, putting her full weight onto the mattress. There was a tearing sensation on the back of her right thigh. Something scraped across her shoulders. She could sense the glass cutting its way through the bedding toward her as she reached down for the box with her foot.

  Then she was free, pausing, her full weight on the box, swinging her other leg down, looking back in through the window—but only for the briefest second. The cabin door exploded in, burned through. The wardrobe vanished. A cloud of flame roared hungrily along the ceiling. In her haste to avoid it, she leaped back and stumbled onto the deck. On one knee by the box, she saw that it had burst open when she dropped it. Inside there were four long guns, magazines, and ammunition boxes.

  At once her hands were busy closing the box. Then she grabbed the handle again and began to lug it toward the ladder.

  Behind her the whole sterncastle burst into flame, but luckily, most of the force of the explosion went up. A breeze from hell itself seemed to waft around her, then she was free of that, too, and racing forward.

  “Robin! What on earth!”

  Richard and Sam Hood came tearing out of the bridge and sprinted toward her. They were close-by and yelling, yet she could only just hear them. “What is that?” called Richard as he neared. His shoulder came by hers, his strong arms reaching back.

  “Rifles,” she said. “Russian…”

  “Kalashnikhovs?” Richard fitted his guess seamlessly into hers.

  “Probably Czech,” chimed in Hood.

  “With ammunition…”

  “That’s cool. Let’s take them.”

  “What on earth d’you think I’m trying to do!”

  So the three of them ran the case of rifles over to the ladder. Hood went down first, then the other two lowered the long box to him.

  Then, even as Richard and Robin stepped aboard, Weary gunned the engine. While Katapult thudded into a cross sea, slowly pulling clear, they stowed what they had found
in the lazarette. Moments later, Hood was helping Weary to set the computer. The sail motors whined as the huge sails extended themselves fore and aft out of the gleaming blade of the mast, then the Australian spun the wheel, letting Katapult lean into the first strong gust of evening wind. She came alive at once and began to skim away. The four of them breathed a sigh of relief, looking back at last.

  Sunset was turning the haze from silver to gold but the incessant spume spun up by the monsoon made the air still heavy. The lingering afternoon heat made the sea seethe and boil even now. They seemed to be sailing through a gargantuan alchemist’s limbeck where the base metal of the nameless ship was being magically transmuted into gold. And even as they looked back, the long mystical spell reached fruition and the black bulk of the freighter vanished into the white-gold heart of an earthbound sun, like a great bubble of tar exploding into flame.

  Struck dumb by the unexpected ferocity of it, they could only gape at the blinding rift in nature where the freighter once had been. Incredibly fast, the power of the explosion overtook them: the light first, moving fastest, dazzling even tight-closed eyes; the sound next, a cataclysmic detonation, flat, almost solid, like an ax blade to the ears. Then a maelstrom of power as the force of the explosion, twisting through the air, tearing through the water, brought the first flying detritus, the first great wave to them.

  Then, for an immeasurable space of time it was as though they were in the grip of a typhoon, pitched this way and that, battered by solid air, rocklike water, steel-sharp wreckage.

  They could do nothing other than crouch on the floor of the cockpit, clinging to each other, with Richard protecting Robin, waiting for it—one way or another—to end.

  Chapter Two

  The Gulf. Off Kharg Island. 08:00 hrs. Local Time.

  The roar of a Bell 126 throttling back to alight on a helipad at the Kharg airstrip drowned out what he was saying. John Higgins, captain of Prometheus II, flagship of the Heritage Mariner tanker fleet, turned away, driving his fist in rage onto the teak rail that stood along the front of the port bridge wing. The thunder of the jet helicopter’s engine was a boon: he had been shouting and this would cover it. He was losing his temper far too much of late. And captains who found themselves yelling at anyone in this heat—especially at their own first officers—would be lucky to stay the course, let alone be posted senior captain, effective admiral of the fleet, as John planned on being.