John Higgins, the second officer, was an old-fashioned sailor at heart. He had a yacht that he kept in the marina at Peel on the Isle of Man, in an anchorage under that tall, frowning castle — an ocean racer, as if he didn’t get enough of the ocean in his line of work. But then, thought Richard indulgently, as he crossed to the chart table, he himself had kept a yacht when he was John’s age. The yacht that had started it alclass="underline" Rebecca.
On board, John was as modern as anyone. Calm, quiet, executive; perfectly at home with the modern machinery and the high-tech aids. But once in a while, Richard knew, some old seadog of an ancestor (a Viking, perhaps, come ravishing after the fair Manx maidens a millennium ago) would peep out of those calm dark eyes; and you would find those small, callused hands of his at some task that sailors had been about for centuries past.
Today he had taken a noon sight of the sun.
“I read it at meridian passage on the dot. Not quite when you started broadcasting. Had Tsirtos check with the World Service pips in case the chronometers were off. Perfect conditions. Perfect sights. Perfect instrument. Never been wrong. Never.” He picked up the instrument lovingly and Richard didn’t like the repetition of “never,” suspecting at once where the conversation was leading.
“So?” he prompted.
“I’ve checked my calculations three times now. Even used the calculator.” An admission of deep desperation.
“But they still disagree with the Satellite Navigation System,” Richard said, giving the Sat Nav its full name, for once.
John nodded. “Look,” he said, sweeping aside the litter on the plastic sheet over the chart. There were two black crosses marked, some inches apart. “According to my sights we’re here.” He pointed to the northernmost.
He reached up and pressed the buttons on the Sat Nav. Figures clicked onto the LCD. “This thing says we’re here.” He pointed to the southernmost cross. He looked starboard suddenly. Richard swung round to follow his gaze. The unladen tanker had moved exactly abeam of them, three miles south.
“If the Sat Nav is to be believed,” said John grimly, “we’ve just collided with her.” Then he caught his breath at the enormity of what he had just said — especially to Richard Mariner — and he stuck his pipe in his mouth at once to cover his confusion.
Richard felt the flesh on his forearms quiver. He took a deep breath. “Keep checking our position against positions obtained from the islands using radar,” he ordered tightly. “And warn the others. I’ll send Sparks up to see what he can do with it.”
On the face of it this worked well enough. Tsirtos, the radio officer—“Sparks”—spent the next couple of hours pulling the Sat Nav to pieces, checking, then reassembling it. He missed lunch. Without him, Slope was quieter.
Lunch was all too short. Officers bustled through the meal and departed busily. Only Martyr showed any disposition to linger, and Richard got the impression the chief wanted to talk to him but didn’t know where to start.
Richard sat, also silent, wondering how to help. But he had been away from the sea too long and had fallen out of the way of ruling a pride of officers.
In the end, both men remained silent and rose when lunch was over with that unspoken conversation rankling between them and making matters worse.
Richard went up to his office and began to make more lists and draw up the agenda for the first captain’s conference, which he wanted to hold in the morning.
After an hour, Tsirtos came to report that the Sat Nav was fixed. Like Martyr, he gave the impression that he would have liked to have said more than he did say, and the captain began to get the mea sure of him, seeing beneath that curious Mediterranean mixture of shy immaturity and boyish bravado another, more calculating, man.
Driven by abrupt restlessness, he rose and gazed along the deck. He had been aboard twenty-four hours now. The Gulf had used that time to get under his skin, in spite of all the tightly enclosed world of Prometheus could do to keep it at bay.
There was an easy chair convenient to the window. He made himself sit down in it to watch the sea and think.
At first, as he woke, he thought something incredibly horrible had happened. Every surface around him seemed to have been rinsed in blood.
Prometheus seemed to be sailing a sea of blood through a downpour of blood.
That was what he saw before he understood what he was seeing.
It was the Shamaal.
The desert wind had crept up behind them, carrying sand like a plague of locusts deep within it. They were traveling at fifteen knots and the wind a little faster. The sand grains and the supertanker were all but still in relationship with each other. The tiny specks of red sandstone and crystal mica percolated through the air with the balletic grace of snowflakes. The sun, halfway to the horizon, looked like a huge blood orange.
Abruptly, the deck beneath Mariner’s feet vibrated to a different beat. He glanced at his watch. 16.30.00. Ben Strong, on the bridge, had cut the speed.
16.30.30. A knock at the door.
“Come!”
It was Slope, sent down to inform the captain of the new situation.
“I’ll come up,” he decided, inevitably.
Even from the bridge, it was difficult to see the forecastle head at the far end of the deck. The usually clear lines of the deck itself were already slightly out of focus, the geometric angles cloaked by curves of drifting sand.
Ben was on watch as Richard entered, standing behind the helmsman’s left shoulder, glaring into the murk. John Higgins, although off duty only half an hour, hovered over the Collision Alarm Radar. As Richard crossed the threshold, he glanced anxiously across at the mate’s back. “Sand’s giving false echoes on this now, Ben,” he said tensely.
“What are we, Ben?” asked Richard, crossing to the captain’s chair. With his arrival, some of the tension seemed to leave the situation.
“Half ahead, making eight knots,” answered Ben, a mea sure of relief audible in his voice. He drew both hands back through the sun-bleached shock of his hair.
“Come to slow and make five.” Richard stood for a moment by the big black leatherbound chair on the port side of the bridge; then he sat with every appearance of ease.
“Slow ahead,” acknowledged Ben, his hand moving on the Engine Room telegraph. The pounding of the engines slowed further, pulsing to a funereal beat. “Five it is.”
The light thickened. Shadows crouched like monsters in corners, under tables. The Sampson posts, two vertical, white-painted loading posts twenty feet high halfway down the deck became almost invisible. “Jesus!” said Ben. “This is impossible. How’s the radar?”
“Murky,” answered John.
“Start the siren, please,” ordered Richard quietly. Immediately, the lost-soul howl boomed out over the Gulf.
The situation was rapidly becoming dangerous. They couldn’t see the length of the deck. They couldn’t rely on the radar. Only the Channel was busier.
“Sparks in the Radio Room?” asked Richard nonchalantly, already certain of the answer.
“Yes,” said Ben.
“Good.” He could warn local shipping if things got any worse. “But I think I still want a particularly sharp pair of eyes up for’ard. Mr. Slope?”
“Sir?”
“Take some glasses and a walkie-talkie. Stroll up to the forecastle head, if you’d be so kind. I’ll arrange for a member of the crew to relieve you shortly.”
“Right, sir.” He turned to go.
For some reason he would never understand, Richard added, “And keep in touch.”