He crossed to the door and opened it. The tiny, dark vestibule was empty. So was his shower on the right. So was his dayroom straight ahead. He had been sleeping fully clothed. He opened the door and looked out into the corridor. It was empty, but it contained a hint of a footstep, a subliminal memory of movement. The silent echo of a softly closed door. Thoughtfully, he closed his own door and returned to bed. This time he undressed and got properly beneath the sheets. The last thing he did was to check the time. It was 03.00 on the dot.
Far below, in the Pump Room, a green illuminated display on the gray box Nicoli had disturbed just before his death switched silently to 00.00; a clock-timer set not to Gulf Time, but to GMT.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning, Richard held lifeboat drill before breakfast. It had been one of Slope’s first duties aboard to draw up and publish the lists, and it was one of the captain’s duties before the end of his first twenty-four hours in command to hold a drill.
It went perfectly satisfactorily, although Richard had hoped to catch one or two slackers and identify potential weaknesses in the running of his ship with the unexpected timing of the exercise. But the only man apparently caught with his trousers down was the chief. Richard was faintly disappointed in the man. They had taken an instant dislike to each other; but Richard had thought him at least efficient.
He stood by his lifeboat. The crew was lined up nearby. The cover was off, the davits swung out. He looked at his stopwatch. Martyr was two minutes later than everyone else…Three…
The sun beat down out of a hard blue sky. There seemed to have been no dawn, no cool morning — simply an abrupt transition from stuffy darkness to blazing heat sometime when no one was looking. There was that faint headwind that bespeaks flat calm — it was Prometheus’s movement, not the movement of the air, that made the wind.
The sea, forty or so feet below the lifeboat’s keel, was like oil; the waves flat and sluggish, disturbed only by the great ship’s passage. The horizons were far and golden, concealing Shiraz behind leagues of Iranian desert to the north and Doha to the south. Prometheus was heading east.
…Four minutes.
Martyr appeared at last, walking briskly, looking as if he would rather have been running. His face, as usual, was absolutely closed but there hung about him a thunderous atmosphere of rage.
“Good morning, Chief,” said Richard, putting his stopwatch away. “Now that everyone is at his station we can clear away and go down to breakfast.”
Martyr could have made any excuse: it would have been accepted as a matter of course. But he seemed content to oversee the repositioning of the boat he was responsible for, then follow the others down and to eat his food in silence.
Richard watched him doing all these things, thinking of the long-gone days when a captain could treat a chief as though he were a junior. No longer. Nowadays captain and chief had to work hand in hand — equals, except in the most extreme circumstances. Nowadays, a captain would never dream of belittling his chief.
But then, at breakfast, things began to make more sense. Richard suddenly found himself leaning forward and squinting. The sun bludgeoning through the window of the Officers’ Dining Room fell upon the white cloth of Martyr’s sleeve like a magnesium flare. Bright enough to reveal, just above the immaculate cuff, a series of tiny, dimpled pinpricks and a couple of short-cut threads.
Richard’s hard blue gaze switched to the far end of the table to where Third Officer Slope and Radio Officer Tsirtos together were rapidly ridding the world of half a dozen eggs and much of a pig. There was about them an air of barely suppressed hilarity that explained almost as much as the marks on Martyr’s cuff.
The captain sat back in his chair, thin-mouthed. This was not a happy ship, and, for all his attempts to pour oil on troubled waters, the situation was not helped when junior officers sewed up the arms and legs of the chief engineer’s uniform while he slept. An act of insubordination which, he strongly suspected, would only make the situation more explosive.
But the rest of that day left little room for mischief. They moved farther east in that tight arc south of the Jezirehs, which guard the Gulf approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. Here, the great 250-mile width of the busy sea lanes is compressed into a mere forty miles before opening out again, into the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the magic fastnesses of the Indian Ocean.
But all that lay far beyond them at the moment.
As in the English Channel, the Strait of Hormuz is divided into lanes like a motorway. First Danny Slope, then John Higgins, then Ben Strong guided them through the day into the first stages of this invisible motorway; plotting their position with careful precision, checking to within scant yards on the Sat Nav equipment up above the chart table, giving orders to the seaman at the helm.
The engineering officers took their corresponding watches below.
Richard, by no means relieved of the burden of fatigue he had carried aboard, filled his morning with paperwork. Not a difficult task. He had forgotten how much everything that happened on board his ship depended on his whim. He had to agree — amend, if he wished — all the menus for the day. The power made him grimly self-mocking: they would all eat baked beans from here to Europoort if he so desired.
He began to detail a list of the conferences it would be necessary to hold. The ship would have to be carefully maintained as they proceeded south toward the wintery Cape. Only a fool would take a summer-laden tanker around those dangerous, stormy, sharp-rocked shores if she were in anything other than tiptop condition. Then, as they proceeded back up the west coast of Africa, they would have to repair the ravages of the southern winter. When Prometheus reached Europoort, Richard wanted her to be in even better shape than she had been in when he assumed command. So he drew up schedules of maintenance and penciled in times and dates. He suspected Ben would have drawn up similar lists. They would compare notes later. Now, who should he get to check the paint lockers? He made a note to ask the chief to draw up a corresponding list for engine maintenance, though he suspected it would have been done long ago.
In the absence of much in the way of videos and books — he had already dispatched his own travel reading, C. S. Forester’s The Happy Return, to the Officers’ Lounge in the hope of starting a new library there — he drew up a short list for an entertainments committee.
He made notes of what he wished to say during his noon broadcast and checked with Tsirtos for any interesting pieces of international news. There wasn’t even a test match.
He gave his noon broadcast.
And at last he had run out of papers to sign and lists to make and dates to pencil and committees to draw and things to do and so he went up onto the bridge.
John Higgins was busy at the chart table. The Collision Alarm Radar, which observed the position of every ship and obstacle nearby, was set on its closest range and would warn them automatically if anything came too near. A GP seaman stood by the helm — a wheel no larger than the steering wheel of a rally car.
Jezireh Ye Queys lay off the port beam, its low golden shoulder shrugging aside the ripples of mercuric water. A VLCC inbound slid a few miles south to starboard — perhaps three miles — riding high and looking huge. Richard watched her for an instant before John appeared at his shoulder. “Captain?”
Richard turned at once, alerted by something in the Manxman’s tone. “Yes?”
“Take a look at this, would you?”
On the chart table lay a litter of pipe, papers, rulers, dividers, chinagraph pencils, calculators, and a sextant.