Inevitably, however, the random march of the waves threw up another winning combination so that the boat rose on the crest of the wave at the same time that Slope did, twenty yards away. He was either waving feebly, or the sea was playing tricks with them. But he wasn’t wearing a life jacket, Richard reckoned grimly; so if he wasn’t alive, he wouldn’t still be afloat.
Waves rose up between them, their crests streaming forward in a continuous spray of filthy spindrift plucked off by the wind. The lifeboat began to seesaw sickeningly. Martyr yelled something unintelligible and raised his right arm. Richard brought the boat’s head starboard. The arm dropped. They straightened. The waves came in on the port quarter, slamming the boat round like pile drivers.
They tilted to starboard, crawled crabwise up the concave face of a ten-footer about to break, and there was Slope, three feet from the stern, swirled past them in a flash and into their lee.
Richard had the helm hard over at once. Martyr threw himself sideways, nearly capsizing them. He caught at Slope. Missed. Caught again. Slope seemed to be floating in a ghastly, foul syrup. His arms were waving madly. The dead white oval of his face projected terror. As Martyr reached the third time, Richard quickly scanned the golden maelstrom for sharks. There were none that he could see. Martyr was on his knees, legs spread, straining forward over the starboard bow. This time their hands met. Closed.
Held.
As the wave broke.
The boat’s head slammed right round. Martyr went sideways so hard he nearly fell overboard. The whole length of Slope’s body crashed against the gunwale. Richard let go of the tiller, diving forward. One hand went to Martyr’s right ankle, steadying him. The other plunged over the side, deep into the sea, trying to grab Slope’s legs.
Something brushed his wrist.
Automatically, he jerked it back out of the water. Then he had let go of Martyr and was reaching for Slope with desperate urgency, understanding the young man’s fear. He was too late. He only saw it for a moment as it neared the surface, struck, and fell away again into the sand-clotted depths. That one glimpse was enough. It was perhaps four feet long, broad as a man’s forearm, and bright unbroken yellow like a buttercup. It moved with the sinuous grace of an eel, but it had the scaly skin and flat, diamond head that could mean only one thing.
Precisely what sort of snake it was, Richard did not know. It had a tiny mouth — all Gulf snakes do — and a long black double tongue. And the fangs that it sank into the tip of Slope’s bare toe, they were surprisingly long, too.
The boy’s body went rigid. The snake fell away, writhing lazily. Richard, his arms in the foaming water to the elbow, grabbed an ankle. “Now!” he yelled, at the top of his voice, and heaved. Slope came in easily, like a length of wood.
Martyr had seen the snake as clearly as Richard had. No sooner was Slope’s body inboard than he ripped the linen belt off his overalls and made a tourniquet, as best he could, halfway up the foot. The flesh grew taut as he pulled it tight, two tiny blue pinpricks leaking blood at the tip of the smallest toe.
“Wild West stuff,” cried Martyr, flourishing a knife. He cut once, hard. Something small and white fell overboard: the top joint of the bitten toe. It was a desperate act — but Slope was in mortal danger from the venom.
The next wave nearly swamped them. Only the weight of the water already in the bilges stopped them tipping over; but far too much more came in over the gunwales. Richard leapt back for the tiller, opened the throttle, and swung her round until wind and weather were at his back.
Just in time. The greatest wave so far lifted them. Crested. Broke. Tarnished silver foam boiled over the side and vomited into their laps. They surfed forward as though hitched to Leviathan through water like the surface of an erupting volcano.
It was like boating at the birth of the world.
Abruptly, the dancing clouds in front of them exploded as though a flare a hundred yards wide had been ignited there. It was Prometheus, with all her lights ablaze.
Five minutes after that, they were aboard. Slope’s inert body was being rushed up to the sick bay. Martyr and Mariner were following side by side in silence, bone weary, slow, old with fatigue.
The whole rescue, which seemed to have taken a lifetime, had actually filled only twenty minutes.
In the sick bay, Slope was lying faceup on the bed. Ben was sticking a plaster over the stump of his toe. The third mate was unconscious, breathing with rasping gasps through a slack mouth. “How is he?” asked Richard.
Ben looked up, a troubled expression sitting ill on his usually open, cheerful face. “Not good. We’ll have to get him to hospital in short order. Nice piece of surgery, Chief. Crude, but nice.”
They were hove-to fifty miles north of Dubai. That was their best bet. There was a fast launch service out from Ras al Kaimah that was regularly used to ferry crews to and from supertankers. But even the fastest launch service was likely to be too slow for Slope.
“Radio for a helicopter,” suggested Martyr, who was destroying a perfectly good towel simply by rubbing his hair with it.
“Couldn’t get out here in this,” countered Richard.
“Neither could the launch,” concluded the chief, looking disgustedly at the oil-smeared wreck of the towel.
In the end, Richard radioed Dubai, who said they would have a helicopter and a launch standing by, each with a medical team. Whichever could go first would go first. Then he set Tsirtos to trying to locate Demetrios.
They went back to slow ahead, making five knots, and altered course slightly, moving slowly southeast, south of Jesireh Ye Sirri, down toward Dubai. At last Richard went to his own cabin, pulling off his soiled shirt as he went and bunching it up in his left fist. Halfway down the C deck corridor, he paused. One more thing, he thought. He crossed to Martyr’s door and knocked.
Abruptly, Martyr was standing in front of him, also naked to the waist; one white towel wrapped around his loins, another draped over his shoulders. His face, neck, and a V on his chest where the collar of his shirt opened, were all deep mahogany. The rest of his torso was pale. The hair on his chest bunched sand-gray and curled down his corrugated belly.
“I wanted to thank you for pulling me out.” Richard stuck out his hand.
Martyr gripped it briefly, then, “Forget it,” he said. “I pushed you in first.” And he began to close the door.
But Richard, now, was no longer willing to be put off. The flat of his hand pressed against the door to stop Martyr’s action and they remained face to face. “I need to know what is going on here,” said Richard, his tone held at reasonable calm by an effort of will. “I have taken command of a ship registered as A-1 at Lloyd’s of London and yet there is some question about the strength of the pipework, the Satellite Navigation equipment is suspect, the radar is faulty, the railing round the deck is dangerously rotten…”
“You know as much about that as I do, Captain,” countered Martyr warily. “All I know is that the engine’s fine.”
“You know more than that! You know what happened in the Pump Room!”
“No more than I wrote in the Accident Report Book. Like I said in the lift yesterday.”
“But you must know more than that, Chief. You knew Captain Levkas and his men…”
“Damned if I did, Captain. I tell you I didn’t know these men. What they were up to, what they were like. I…”
“Like?” exploded Richard. “You know very well what they were like. They got drunk on bridge watch. They enjoyed watching sick pornography. They were the scum of the earth and they were up to no good.”
“That may have been the situation then, Captain. But now they’re dead and you’re here…” Martyr’s voice was calm but tinged with irony.