The Fire Ship Read online

  The helicopter, a blinding speck in the dazzling haze, settled away onto the great gray black monstrosity of the refinery-island, dragging its noise with it, sluggishly over the Gulf. John turned back to face the subject of his ire, Lieutenant Cecil Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer, Prometheus. Behind the captain’s immaculate shoulder, fifty feet down, the main deck of the tanker stretched away to the forecastle head. The green, pipe-covered expanse of it was crawling with G.P. seamen in white overalls and officers in white uniforms all working in concert. At a tank top halfway down the deck in the ineffective shade of a Sampson post clustered a group of figures with cylinders and backpacks. Around them, in pattern, stretching across and along the deck, more men looked earnestly into the black dots of open Butterworth plates, down into the empty tank.

  John could sense the intensity of preparations for getting his ship under way. It filled the furnace air all around him. He knew where each crew member was and what he or she was doing. The activity seemed almost anarchic, but in fact it was not. One team was completing a thorough internal check of a troublesome empty tank—a matter of some urgency as Prometheus had mysteriously been moved to the head of the line of empty tankers waiting to take on a load of oil. She would begin loading tonight. The others—deck and engineering officers alike—were preparing to receive the oil aboard. Only those on watch were at tasks unrelated to the cargo’s reception.

  Only those on watch and First Lieutenant Cecil Smyke. Cecil stood, pale as a ghost, copper ringlets tarnished with sweat, round brown eyes narrowed by more than the glare, aristocratic face lined by more than centuries of breeding. Of all the times to get hung over to the point of incapacity, he had chosen the very worst.

  “I warned you,” began his captain once again, his anger just under control now, “I warned you last night, Number One. If you want to play your stupid, juvenile games aboard my ship, be sure, be certain, they do not interfere with your duty!”

  Smyke wavered slightly, a tall, thin figure in a silk dressing-gown. He kept his thin lips pressed closely together, all too aware of what might happen if he allowed them to part for an instant.

  “Now look at us,” stormed the captain. “We still haven’t finished checking that blasted tank. We’re expected to move to the head of the queue, preferably without bumping into any of those poor beggars who have been stewing here for the better part of a month, and begin to take on a full load of crude in twelve hours’ time. With all the attendant paperwork. We have as a matter of some urgency to get stocked up for a return journey to Europort—a journey that is likely to start in a couple of days’ time. With all the damn paperwork that goes with it. And I have a first officer who cannot even stand up straight!”

  This was, perhaps, a bit unfair, thought the captain wryly: the idiot was making almost heroic efforts to stand up straight. John Higgins prowled around him exuding outrage.

  “You should be going down number-four tank but you’re sick instead.” The list of difficulties this caused began to wash over Smyke altogether. He closed his eyes. He had never seen the easygoing Captain Higgins—a common little oik, thought Cecil, for all his seniority—so enraged. Never believed the captain could become so enraged. Whole new vistas opened up before him as he really took stock of John Higgins for the first time. Richard Mariner’s right hand, they said, blessed with some of the great man’s genius. Little John, they called him—and never mockingly; as though Richard Mariner were Robin Hood reborn. Smyke hadn’t really credited it. Until now.

  What if Little John could see beneath the bravado to the real reason Smyke was not on duty this morning? What if this suddenly formidable man realized his first officer had got himself into this state precisely so he could avoid going down into the tank today?

  Suddenly the ship’s emergency siren exploded in three short blasts: trouble in the tank. John Higgins forgot all about his useless first officer and burst into the cool of the bridge at a run.

  And behind him, on the bridge wing he had just vacated, Lieutenant Cecil Jolyon Carruthers Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer, Prometheus (ret.), opened his mouth to call out and threw up all over himself.

  As he ran onto the bridge John looked down, automatically setting the stopwatch function on his wristwatch. He knew the bridge so well, and dictated the positioning of everything on it so precisely, that he did not need to look where he was going. The zeros flashed up, the hundredths spinning. Four minutes to go and every instant crucial. John’s mind was working as busily as the figures on his watch dial. Smyke was bloody useless. Everyone else was extra busy and would be slower because of it. Should he send Don Edwards, his third lieutenant? No, he’d better do it himself. Hell! it never rained but it…

  He was through the bridge, past the collision alarm radar, round the central bank of instruments, and out into the bridge-deck corridor before the thought was completed. Kerem Khalil, senior general purpose seaman aboard, and unofficial chief petty officer, was standing by the lift holding the doors open. Shoulder to shoulder they leaped in. The little car was in motion almost before the doors were closed, while Kerem’s broad finger was still hovering over the A-deck button.

  “Who’s called…” The words were torn from John like a curse. No one should be using this lift except the crash team. But it was Asha Quartermaine. She had called it from C deck where her cabin was. “Sorry,” she said, pushing her doctor’s bag in first, then straddling it. “Caught me with my pants down.”

  Literally, thought John, his mind sidetracked to her for a moment. Unself-consciously, she stood in the elevator next to them buttoning up a white cotton boiler suit under which there seemed to be nothing but her powerful body. She must have been in the shower when the alarm sounded so she just leaped into the suit and some shoes and ran. The shoes were unlaced, the cotton suit threatening to go transparent where it was wet.

  Asha swept the red mane of her hair out of her startling russet eyes. Her gaze met his and she grinned: an irresistible flash of strong white teeth. Then she was down on one knee tying her laces. She was the most extraordinary ship’s doctor John had ever sailed with but he could not imagine any other he would prefer to have with him now.

  The lift reached A deck and the three of them burst out at a dead run. They sped out through the bulkhead door onto the main deck. Here for the first time they hesitated for an instant beside a rack of adult-size BMX bikes. Had the emergency happened farther away, they would have used these to speed down the quarter-mile of Prometheus’s deck. “No!” John made the decision at once. “Quicker to run!” He was off first but the other two kept up with him even though Asha still carried her doctor’s bag.

  John checked his watch at the open tank top—ninety seconds and ticking—as the waiting seamen strapped oxygen tanks to their backs. Then his hands were in motion again, adjusting the face mask and holding the tank’s raised metal rim as he swung his brawny leg inside it, pushing his foot down onto the first step. Little more than two minutes left to find the second officer’s team and the chief engineer who was with them, and to find out what was wrong and to put it right. In any ship’s hold a difficult task; in one of this ship’s tanks almost impossible.

  The midship tank her captain was now entering, like an ancient miner going down some massive subterranean gallery, plunged nearly one hundred feet sheer to the keel. It was half the ship wide—more than one hundred feet again—and nearly one hundred fifty feet long. One and a half million cubic feet: volume enough to contain a modest cathederal. And, like a cathederal, it was divided into aisles, chapels, and choirs by great walls and buttresses of steel designed to stop the cargo from moving with too destructive a force; designed to stop it from tearing the ship apart. The buttresses reached in from the sides of the tank, broke away to become full columns here and there, plunging to the dark serrations of the floor where partial walls arose in series like giant pews facing invisible altars bow and stern, steel pews, eight, ten, twelve feet high. Each pew was pierced by holes but such were the de
mands of their dangerous, restless cargo that none of these could be made big enough to admit even the slimmest body wearing an oxygen tank.

  One hundred seconds and counting. John hesitated on the first balcony—scarcely bigger than a table—and glanced up from his watch. Asha was climbing down above him. He turned away; tore himself away: he could not pause to gaze up at her now. He crossed the platform with one stride and stepped out over space. The crash team followed him one by one. They were well practiced. With the exception of lifeboat drill, this was the most regularly rehearsed emergency. And the one everyone was most terrified of doing for real.

  These thoughts served to take him across to the relative security of the steps down the tank’s sheer side, across the yawning gap he hated most. Pausing with the familiar slick steel so warm and reassuring by his right shoulder, he paused for a micron to look back, then ran on downward with what he had seen still imprinted on his retina.

  The ladder came vertically from the tank top to that tiny platform six feet square suspended impossibly in that cavernous vastness, lit simply by the vertical spotlight of Gulf brightness plunging down until it was dissipated by the darkness far above the tanker’s serrated floor. Out from that platform, moving at once into darkness, reappearing under increasingly vague pools of illumination from the open Butterworth plates—bright moons fading to faint stars in the vault of the roof beside the hard-edged sun of the tank top—came the one delicate arch of the steps he had just crossed. Light and dark they curved, like ballistic motion frozen in steel, down to the platform he had just vacated. Fifty feet—sixty, allowing for the slope—of steel step and steel rail looking like thread and seeming to sway as Asha began to cross toward him.

  Two mins. thirty and counting…He was only a third of the way down to the tank floor—and that floor was fifteen thousand square feet of sludgy, echoing maze with walls made out of steel. He plunged down the steps, running his right hand along the slick wall while his left held the banister, like a frightened child. He was gasping oxygen at a dangerous rate, almost feeling sympathy for Smyke, who needed oxygen for quite different reasons.

  “…Dr. Quartermaine here. On platform two, descending. Over…”

  Hell! He had forgotten to check in. He bloodied his knuckles on the transmit button of his built-in radio. “Captain here. Past platform two, descending. Ten seconds ahead of you, Doctor.”

  “Khalil here. On platform two. Five seconds behind Dr. Quartermaine, descending.”

  “Dr. Quartermaine here. Who’s down there?”

  “Deck here, Doctor, Cadet Perkins…”

  “Captain here. All right, Mr. Perkins. I have the list.” He was relieved to be able to say it—it put him back in charge somehow. It was written on a plasticcoated notepad dangling from his oxygen tanks, both pad and tanks like those used by a deep-sea diver. It was very much like going diving, in fact, for the environment down here could be every bit as deadly as the most dangerous deeps of the ocean.

  John did not pause on platform three, halfway down the staircase. Instead, prompted by Asha’s question, he scanned the list while he hurried deeper into the tank. Four familiar names registered in a flash. He had held the board so that he could see his watch at the same time and when he hit the transmit button by his left ear his voice was betraying increasing tension. “Captain here. Past platform three. Three minutes and counting. Doctor, about that list…”

  A vagary of wind—the huge tank had its own microclimate—made the flesh stir on his naked forearms and abruptly he envied Asha the protection of her semitransparent cotton. No one could ever be quite sure what the air down here contained. It could be poisonous, corrosive, explosive—anything. Normally, under power, the empty tank would be full of inert gas from the ship’s engine pumped in here to smother the faintest possibility of a spark. And even that nonexplosive gas, protecting them from explosion, was nevertheless quite deadly. But there should be no inert gas in the tank now. Now they were at rest. Now the tank was full of air while the work on one of the automatic cleaners went ahead; of air and God knew what else. John had expected to be waiting for days before Prometheus’s tanks were filled. He had taken the chance to pump the gas out of this tank, fill it with air, and send down the team to fix a faulty washer in it.

  Air was in many ways the most dangerous thing of all to allow down here, for it contained oxygen, and that could combine with the hydrocarbon gasses oozing from the ever-present oil sludge to create the most lethal cocktail imaginable. It hung invisibly all around them in the darkness. It could lie low, like ground fog at sunset. It could sail high, deadly clouds floating under the night-black sky of the tank’s roof. It could form bubbles, discrete, absolute, where the concentration went from 0 percent to 100 percent in a millimeter. He had seen gas readers jump from SAFE to DEADLY in a step. And once you were trapped in one of those bubbles, you would be lucky to break free; the stuff clung like gaseous glue. But no matter what circumstances you started breathing the gas under, you had only four minutes of life left unless a crash team brought you oxygen. Yet it was impossible to work down here for any length of time wearing heavy breathing equipment. The team he was racing toward would have had breathing equipment with them but they would have been breathing the air unprotected as they worked.

  The malfunction of the automatic tank washing unit had shown up on Smyke’s computers during routine checking yesterday. Now it was important to get the unit fixed and clean the tank before loading a new cargo—hence the visit by more than a normal survey team: the first name on John’s crayon-written list was that of the irreplaceable American chief engineer, Bob Stark.

  God! He hoped Bob was all right. They had sailed together regularly during the last five years, and their current lazy, friendly rivalry for the attentions of Asha Quartermaine hid a deep affection.

  His feet skidded, thick rubber soles suddenly failing to find traction. He looked down, surprised to find himself standing on the tank floor, virtually up to his ankles in black ooze. “Captain here. On tank floor. Beware thick oil scum.”

  He glanced at his watch again and Asha was at his side. Four minutes clicked up. Kerem joined them. That was it. One man remained on platform 3 looking for lights. Bob’s team should have been signaling since they radioed for help, to guide the crash team in. Ominously there had been no lights: that darkness over by the suspect unit made John fear for his chief engineer’s life.

  He turned toward the first of the seven steel walls between them and their goal, only to bite back a shout of fright. Straightening into the beam of his torch came the figure of the man he feared dead. And, behind him, the rest of the team. Alive, unconcerned, all of them breathing the air.

  John tore his headset off, gulping in the oil-tainted, nonlethal atmosphere. “Bob!” he stepped forward, hand thrust out, almost overcome with relief. Stark’s open, cheerful countenance folded into a look of concern as he took in Asha’s presence. He swept one hand back through the tousled gold shock of his hair, letting the farmboy cowlick fall to his narrow blue eyes in an unconscious gesture.

  “What’s this?” he demanded. “Some kind of exercise?”

  “Didn’t you broadcast an emergency?”

  “Us? Nope. Clear and clean. Fixed the unit. No problem.”

  “Then what…”

  “Captain!” Distant voice from the headset in the helmet in his hand. “Deck here. Capt…”

  They set off at a run, everything else forgotten but the urgent need to answer that panic call from above.

  John didn’t even think to switch off his stopwatch. It had just clocked up eight minutes when he stepped up out of the tank top to stagger a little, stunned by the humid heat and brightness, across his silent deck. He sensed rather than saw Asha, Bob, and the others come up behind him, for all his attention was focused on what was going on in front of him.

  Every officer, cadet, and crewman in his complement stood assembled here in shocked, silent lines, hands on heads, under the guns of a dozen figu
res dressed in camouflage fatigues and bright checked kaffiyah headdresses that hid their faces like masks.

  Such are the vagaries of shock that John was overwhelmed at first, not by this act of terrorist piracy, but by the stunning cleanness of the air. And yet there was a familiar scent there too, terrifyingly out of place. He felt suddenly cold and stepped forward after the merest instant of hesitation. At once one of the guns was leveled at him and he saw a tiny trickle of smoke oozing from the muzzle. And he recognized the smell as cordite.

  Then even as this jumble of sensation fell into place in his mind he noticed something else. There, at the terrorist’s feet was Cecil Smyke, sitting, apparently at his ease, against a vertical deck pipe. But even as John recognized that languid, silk-clad body, it rolled onto its side like a stuffed toy and slumped over until its sickstained chest was hidden from view. Only then could everyone see the gaping bullet wound where the back of his head used to be.

  Chapter Three

  England.

  Six hours later, three thousand miles west, a black Bentley Turbo Mulsane came off the M6 just south of Penrith, in the north of England, crossed the river and the railway, and began to climb Edenside toward Croglin and Cold Fell. It rode up the slate-dark Cumberland country like a thunderbolt heading for the opening of Macbeth. A gray summer’s day was drawing to its haunted, misty close and the precipitous, heathermottled hills were beginning to resemble slag heaps from the Black Country farther south.