The Fire Ship Page 5

  Christ! He hoped Helen wouldn’t worry too much.

  Better not to think about that. Better not to think too much at all, actually.

  Beirut seemed the best guess then. No doubt he would have plenty of time to test his hypothesis further.

  Chapter Four

  Indian Ocean. Lat. 13° N. Long. 55° E.

  “Give me the binoculars,” Robin demanded, her voice suddenly tense.

  Richard didn’t hear her. Just at the moment she spoke, a sound, something more felt than heard, rumbled in his ears, distracting his attention from her and from his watch. He moved his head, concentrating on the sinister vibration in the air. Was it distant thunder? Was it something nearer, more threatening? He didn’t like it, whatever it was. He glanced up along the spotted skin of the fully extended sail to the blast-damaged wreck at the masthead: perhaps there was something wrong there. Weary hadn’t trusted that masthead even before flying debris had destroyed it all those hours ago during the destruction of that nameless ship, wrecking their communications equipment, necessitating the careful watch Robin and he were now keeping, perhaps doing more dangerous damage besides. Then Robin called again and he concentrated on her instead. “What did you say, darling?”

  “Give me the binoculars. There’s something out there.”

  He reached down into the rack where the field glasses were kept and gritted his teeth as the ache in his swol- len elbow, like the damaged masthead a relic of the freighter’s death, flared into pain.

  “Here.” He handed them up to her. She slung them round her neck, then gripped the glass windscreen by his head to steady herself. She carefully rearranged her stiff body until she was kneeling, painfully twisted to allow for the angle of Katapult’s deck.

  Richard strained to follow the direction of her gaze, but he could see nothing. The ocean continued to come at them in an unvarying series of waves, each one banded like the one before with the faint, curving slick of oil they were still following. About ten yards wide and God alone knew how long, it stretched back like a ghostly, humpbacked road into the haze.

  “Anything?”

  They were speaking in hushed monosyllables not only because of fatigue. Robin had been sitting up on the cabin roof watching for hours in silence. Richard had the helm because he could stand easily where she could not. Hood and Weary were asleep below, Hood with a cracked rib and Weary with a great welt across the back of his skull. None of them had come through the explosion unscathed. Even crouching all together on the cockpit’s floor they had each been hurt in one way or another by that hard, hot rain of debris.

  The subliminal rumble, half sound, half sensation, came again. Richard checked the damaged topworks once more. Letting his eyes follow the curved sails down, along the blade of the mast to the ball-and-socket joint where the whole mast sat in its steel mast-foot, just below the swellings that housed the retractable telescopic booms, three feet above the deck. He knew the mast was stepped in a ring of steel embracing the central hull at this point. Could there be anything wrong there? He frowned, trying to pick up that sound again.

  Robin screwed the eyepieces of the binoculars into her eye sockets; they seemed to magnify the blinding dazzle without helping her to see farther at all. She dropped them and brushed the sweat out of her eyes with unaccustomed anger. Somehow, during the mayhem that had come so close to destroying even Katapult, all the men had ended up in a huddle on top of her. Their wounds were due to flying debris—her painfully twisted knee was due to their clumsy attempts at gallantry. She didn’t know whether she was more vexed with them for hurting her or with herself for being so ungrateful.

  Katapult smashed into a breaking crest and leaped playfully with what sounded like a roar of joy. She flexed automatically and gasped in pain. God! What a bunch of schoolboys! Here she was, perfectly capable of looking after herself, trying to maintain the last of her independence before motherhood shackled her down, and she found herself surrounded by a would-be James Bond and the Macho Twins. Great!

  She pushed the binoculars back under her brows and suddenly forgot all about her rage. There it was—in full view, surprisingly close at hand. She fine-focused automatically, her breath suddenly short with excitement. Oil-smeared, battered, perhaps empty, certainly showing no sign of life at the moment, but at the near edge of the oil-track, thank God, it was less than a mile away.

  “Richard, come starboard a point or two. There’s a lifeboat less than a mile ahead.”

  “Any sign of life?” His excited voice lost in the rumble of a wave against Katapult’s flank.

  Robin was scanning it carefully now. The ravaged lifeboat was low in the water, floating at a strange angle. One gunwale of the boat was lower than the other so that it showed one side, but not its contents. Beyond that, nothing seemed wrong. Perhaps there was someone lying over on the lifeboat’s port side. Several people, their weight distributed unevenly, might make it ride like that. But Robin wasn’t convinced, her initial feeling of excitement killed by her common sense. More likely it was the wind playing tricks with an empty hull. Robin noticed the wind was freshening, pushing Katapult over more. Her starboard outrigger sank deeper, the narrow delta of the aquadynamic composite down deep enough to gain a green tinge from the foundations of a glassy wave. The threatening wind made Robin glance down from the lifeboat to consider the craft she was riding on. Katapult’s two outriggers curved out and forward athwart the raked mast plunging past hinges, where the shrouds were tethered, to enter the water on either side of Katapult’s lean central hull. Deep below the surface, the outriggers spread into two Concorde shapes that cut through the sea as efficiently as that great airplane hurtled through the sky, their angles controlled by the computer controlling Katapult herself. At the moment the electronic system kept her steady in the face of the freshening wind and the threatening chop.

  Robin suddenly felt at risk up here on the deck. She swung round, licking the salt off her lips, hissing in sudden pain as she put her weight on her damaged leg. One step along the freeboard and she hopped in over the coaming down into the cockpit beside him.

  “Shall I call the others?” she asked. “We may need their help.”

  “Not yet.” His voice was distant.

  “Rick…” She said his pet name almost shyly. It was something she almost never did in public and she sounded confused even in her own ears. Had her vexation taken her too far? Was he really angry with her?

  She found herself embarrassed and unaccountably close to tears. She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes as though brushing sweat away, and looked back toward the lifeboat, disguising her momentary weakness, even from herself.

  Katapult lurched. Automatically she held on to the cockpit’s coaming, her left hand reaching out for Richard’s shoulder. The white, oil-blotched hulk of the lifeboat was still half a mile distant, but Katapult seemed to be picking up speed extremely quickly. There was a sudden series of clicks as the computer was forced to reset the outriggers and trim the sails, the clear mechanical sounds making it shockingly obvious just how much the noise of the wind and sea had grown in the last few minutes. Instinctively she tightened her grip on the thick, hard triangle of muscle behind his collarbone. Katapult lurched again and this time she felt something—a slap of wind on her cheek. The trimaran gathered even more way as though she were a racing car with the turbo kicking in. She heard the wheel slap into the palms of his hands and she felt his whole body tense. “God, Robin, she’s pulling hard. There’s something…”

  “What is it?”

  “Damned if I know. Aach…” He made a peculiarly Scottish sound of disgust, left over from his Edinburgh schooldays, and put the wheel right over, taking the way off her. The sail motors automatically gathered the sails in. Katapult’s mast leaped upright and they staggered into each other’s arms as the deck came level—surprised by how much heel there had been on her. As her speed decreased, so the wind seemed to pick up even more. “It’s probably nothing,” he said softly as h
e let her go. “Maybe a squall coming. I don’t know…”

  Robin glanced away from the lifeboat and looked around carefully, but the depressing haze swirled round Katapult, almost willfully concealing everything. It was impossible to make out any cloud formations or see the telltale darkening of air and sea that foreshadowed changing weather. She glanced down into the black bowl of the dead radar—along with the radio and the masthead it was another casualty of the explosion.

  The unusual movement of the air stopped.

  Richard turned away and reached down to push the start button of the engine. Robin directed her gaze back to the lifeboat. Something was very wrong. Perhaps distance had disguised it. Certainly that errant freak of wind and the swirling haze had camouflaged it. But when one looked carefully, it was obvious that the boat was not sitting correctly in the water. It was angled up and away almost as if it were willfully trying to hide something from them.

  Richard pushed the starter button, the engine coughed into life. Katapult began to slide forward again uneasily over the choppy water in that slightly ungainly fashion she had if anything other than the wind impelled her.

  Without any good reason, Robin suddenly felt reluctant to get any closer to the lifeboat. She swung round toward Richard, half expecting him to be sharing her foreboding, but he was concentrating absolutely on guiding Katapult across the wind. He was half in love with the sleek vessel and worried about soiling one square inch of her dazzling white hull with the black taint of the dead ship’s lifeblood. The lifeboat was at the outer edge of the oil-slick and clearly Richard wanted to follow its track round, keeping clear of the oil, bringing only Katapult’s nose alongside the stricken boat. Someone would have to be out there on the farthest point of the bow to grab hold of the boat and secure it to Katapult.

  The thought of being out there, so near the boat and so far from the others, frightened her. In near panic, she found herself halfway to the stairs leading down to Weary and Hood. And yet it was that very fear that stopped her. She knew fear of old, knew it as well as most; and unvaryingly she met it and faced it. If she was frightened of doing something, she did it: that was the sort of person she was.

  Let Hood and Weary sleep. She would take care of this. Robin walked back and snapped a boathook free of its retaining clips along the lazarette; then she used it as a sort of crutch to support her as she stepped back up onto the sloping foredeck. Forcing herself not to limp, she moved along the hull to the needlepoint bow. She had been here once or twice before, but only briefly and never alone. And it struck her forcefully how small the forepeak was, how terrifyingly close to the dangerous ocean.

  Katapult’s forward deck sloped down as well as in so that the low deck-railings seemed mere inches above the water. Waves were supposed to ride up over the sleek porpoise shape when the vessel was in full flight; Katapult’s designers had not worried about crew who would have to accept blue water washing over their feet as well as that vertiginous feeling that the tiny forepeak was a thin ledge at a very great height. It seemed impossible to Robin that she should become dizzy with vertigo when she was a foot or two above the surface of the sea, but her imagination left her in no doubt whatsoever that if she slipped she would fall—and fall and fall. The foresail was designed to furl or unfurl from the aerodynamic blade of the mast along a telescopic boom just as the mainsail did. They were both tucked safely into the mast now and the foredeck was innocent of any protrusion whatsoever. Even the motor winches and the anchor, the retracting bowsprit designed to take a spinnaker, all the forward equipment lay contained below on a second foredeck just beneath her feet. There was nothing between her and the hungry sea but that derisory little safety rail. Around this she locked her left fist as though she were a cowhand astride a bucking bronco. Only then did she look up and out.

  The side of the lifeboat winked at her from twenty feet away. Pitching over the waves, rolling in the gusts of wind, it nevertheless refused to show her what it contained. She heard only the roaring of the wind across the blade of the mast behind her, the tumble of the waves at the stern of the lifeboat, the sucking hiss of them at her feet. Then thunder—abruptly she looked up. The haze roiled weirdly in the distance dead ahead. It was growing thicker and darker there. Had the thunder come…

  —the thunder of the wind across the ruined masthead eighty feet above her, real, tangible, putting her mind at rest.

  She looked back down at the boat again. It was much nearer now, fifteen feet almost dead ahead and at last there was something…

  The high white side rolled down suddenly, a freak wave running across the rest. It was a momentary thing, over in a flash, but surely she had seen…

  “Hey, hello the boat!”

  …yes, she was certain she had seen…

  “Hello the lifeboat, can you hear me? Hey!”

  …two or three figures. The outlines of some heads and shoulders clinging to the side.

  Why didn’t they answer? Perhaps they were too exhausted. But she was certain of what she had seen. With rekindled excitement she let go of the safety rail and began to pull herself to her feet. It took her two painful attempts to unlock the damaged knee, but as Katapult’s head creamed over the remaining ten feet toward the lifeboat, the glassy swell washing over Robin’s feet began to darken with oil-tar so she pulled herself to full height. Then she began to maneuver the unwieldy length of the boathook out toward the white gunwale before her.

  But then another wave ran counter and for all her fortitude she began to scream.

  It was full of corpses. They lay toppled on the bottom in a twisted pile in a range of attitudes that suggested they were reaching out in their last instant of life. And what they were reaching for remained. At the far side of the boat, frozen in the act of climbing aboard were five more men, their hands still entwined with the dead hands in the boat. Five figures, stark against the dazzling blue of the ocean, all of them clustered along the port side, their weight enough to give the boat its list, reaching with both arms inward, the gunwales snugly under their armpits, their dusky, bearded faces mottled, bloodless, as gray as the bridge of their stricken ship had been. Eyes staring blindly, mouths screaming silently. All but one looked straight at Robin; they had been dead for a day at least but were still howling for help. The last one, the stern-most of them, was looking away, staring down into the water behind him. What little Robin could see of his face wore the most terrible expression of all.

  He was staring down, horrified, frozen, in apparent fascination at the fact that his body ended just above the waterline. Another wave slammed into the far side of the doomed lifeboat, lifting the hanging figure high enough for Robin to see all too clearly where a shark had taken him off at the ribs like a chain saw.

  She let the boathook slip into the ocean, turned, and ran. All thought of challenging the fear was gone: nothing mattered except the overwhelming need to escape the horror of the sight. She sprinted back down Katapult’s deck, her wet shoes miraculously finding a clear path between the gathering hump of the cabin side and the low gunwale; her knee holding up uncomplainingly until she was back in the cockpit.

  At her first cry, Richard cut the engine and spun the wheel back, taking Katapult’s head—and the person on it—away from whatever threatened. He was half out of the cockpit on his way to help when she brushed past him. He followed for a step or two, but she made it plain she needed no help. He returned to the starboard, therefore, to see what was to be done.

  He had not put the wheel far enough over. Katapult had not moved away from the lifeboat, but collided with it at a glancing angle and gathered it to herself, collecting it like an errant chick under the wing of her starboard outrigger. Richard froze with horror; nausea threatened to overcome him and he turned away, haunted by the gentle thump, thump, thump of the lifeboat.

  The afternoon closed down on them in a dreadful silence; all sound and motion were driven from the face of the sea. Thump went the boat, and everything seemed to stop.

 
; A rumble of thunder, much nearer than any other.

  Thump went the lifeboat.

  A faint whisper of wind came and grew in intensity. Something completely different from the monsoon they had been following so far. This was a dangerous wind, a wind with a purpose.

  Katapult heeled over. The lifeboat rattled and thumped between the hull and the outrigger. The dead men lying in her stirred; the dead men hanging at her side danced merrily, holding hands as though they were playing a ghastly children’s game. Then the spray-mist that had hung over them for days began to clear, vanishing downwind as though rushing off to see what the wind was going to see.

  Richard and Robin came out of their trances, both of them suddenly very cold indeed. Their eyes met and they were in action at once, everything else forgotten. Something was very wrong here and this was no time to be sqeamish: they had to search the lifeboat and then get Katapult away from here as quickly as they could.

  Richard gave her a hand as she hopped up and out along the runway again. By good fortune, Katapult had snagged the boathook as well as the boat, so Robin concentrated on that, on the bright orange buoyancy handle at its end with its wrist-loop for safety. She plunged her hand into the icy ripples and caught it first time. Then she pushed its bright hook into the stern of the restless little boat and leaned back, holding it still, keeping her eyes closed tight.

  It was only now that Richard seriously thought about calling the other two. Searching a twenty-foot lifeboat containing more than ten dead bodies was not something one person could do efficiently or quickly. And the need for speed was suddenly impressed on him. The stern-most of the upright figures seemed suddenly to move. Richard looked up, shocked out of his meditation, in time to see a battered cap fly off the figure’s frozen head and spin away, carried by the same eerie wind through which the ripples were running and the oily spume was beginning to fly.