Only Richard was not watching her. He had arrived half an hour ago — precisely when expected — checked the lookouts on the bridge wings, checked logs, speed, course, and heading, all the things he would normally check, and sat himself down as usual. He paid his third mate the same courtesy as he would have given any other: he was on the bridge and responsible; she was on watch and in charge.
It had taken hours more of heated — impassioned — discussion, far into the small hours of the morning, to make him accept the situation, even though — as she had pointed out to Angus El Kebir — she held all the high cards.
And, she suspected, he had seen beneath what she was saying to some of her hidden, secret, desperate reasons.
But it was done: save that her bags were in the owner’s suite, as befitted her relationship with the cargo, she was the third mate.
Richard’s mind was full to bursting, for all the languid mien of his long body. Leaving aside the memories that Robin had brought with her, there were all the normal worries of running a ship; all the peculiar problems of running this one. The strange chief. The sorry state of a ship listed as A-1 for Lloyd’s. The unreliability of apparently first-rate equipment. The last crew. The drink on the bridge. The pornography. As he had said to Martyr, he suspected all too vividly what might have been going on in the past. But now things were different. Regular. And he would do his utmost to ensure they remained that way.
“Captain!” Robin broke into his reverie, pointing to starboard.
There, a couple of miles away, lay the maze of low islands — lost in the glare for the most part — stretching out from the Musandam Peninsula, climaxing in that pair of islands, used as a guide for uncounted generations, called the Quoins.
They were going out through the doorway of the Gulf at last. Overcome by an unaccountable rush of elation, Richard decided not to wait until they had “turned the corner” at Rass Al Hadd: “Good. Tell Sparks to make a telex,” he ordered. “To the owner, Kostas Demetrios [wherever he is]:‘Left the Gulf at 11.10 local time, July twenty-first’…” He paused, then added. “‘All well so far, Prometheus.’”
PART 2
INDIAN OCEAN
CHAPTER NINE
They came for Robin six nights later when she was coming off watch at midnight as they crossed the Line.
Two burly sea nymphs sprang from the shadows of the corridor and caught her tired arms. Surprised, she looked over her shoulder but Ben was oblivious — crouching over the chart table already, rechecking her calculations of their course and exact position.
She opened her mouth but was immediately gagged. One of them giggled girlishly, reeking of alcohol, and she knew it would be useless to struggle against them. Although she hated the feeling of powerlessness even more than she had thought she would, she knew there was no alternative, so she gave a mental shrug and went along for the time being, wondering queasily what to expect.
On bare feet, silent except for the swish of their seaweed skirts, they ran her to the lift, then crowded in beside her. The light had been put out of commission so they plunged downward in absolute darkness.
Robin stood still and straight, her mind a whirl of possibilities, her long upper lip prickling with sweat. It was a stultifyingly hot night. The grip of the sea nymphs, one on each arm, threatened to bruise her tense flesh. She calmed herself by trying to work out who they were. She had been aboard a week now, after all, and she felt she was getting to know the officer complement well.
Ben Strong was on the bridge. That ruled him out for the moment, though Robin was firmly of the opinion that he would be involved in this somewhere along the line. The two of them had not really hit it off. Strong was Richard’s godson, almost his adopted son, but no two men could be less alike. The first officer was brown-eyed, deeply tanned, sandy-haired, powerful but slightly plump. She felt he affected the languid, sarcastic airs of an aristocrat in a cheap romance: manners that only charm would have made acceptable. Ben did not charm her at all, for the strong-minded, energetic, enthusiastic young woman had found her superior officer either over-solicitous, patronizing, or bullying; constantly surprised that she knew what she was doing. And, if Ben was on the bridge, then Paul Rice, the Welsh first engineering officer, a dark, slight hard man from Tiger Bay who boasted a knife scar on his right cheek, would be in the Engine Room.
Unless the mysterious, unreadable chief was relieving him. That was possible. Not probable — schoolboy pranks did not seem to have any place in Martyr’s character — but Robin had simply been unable to sum the man up; so anything was possible.
John Higgins would be involved. On the one hand, the quiet Manxman — possibly under Richard’s unofficial direction — would be there to see things did not go too far. On the other hand, this was an important part of traditional sea lore and he would want to see it done right: she would have to keep an eye out for a strange sea creature sucking on an unlit pipe.
David Napier would be there too. The second engineering officer. A hard-faced Mancunian bully, a great square ex-boxer with thin stubble-hair and a flattened nose, Napier would delight in making things as unpleasant as possible. She would be well advised to keep out of the clutches of his massive, apelike hands.
That left McTavish and Tsirtos. They were the most likely candidates for sea nymphs. And while McTavish, good Glaswegian Presbyterian that he was, did not drink, Tsirtos most certainly did.
She began to explore the black air around her for the exact source of the fumes.
At no time did it occur to her that Richard might be directly involved in any of this.
The lift jarred to a halt. The door opened to a blaze of light at whose heart stood a gargoyle figure half fish, half man, bewigged and hideously masked like the sea nymphs. Two green arms reached out toward her and even before her vision had cleared from the glare, a bag went over her head.
During the last six days they had begun the voyage proper. As soon as the restrictions of the Gulf were left behind, Richard had ordered full ahead and Prometheus had answered with an easy fifteen knots.
At this speed, never varying, day in day out, they had proceeded on a course a little south of east out of the Gulf of Oman and across Cancer; a degree or two east of south across the Arabian Sea, east of the Red Sea approaches and past Socotra.
Now they were moving west of south, swinging toward southwest proper, preparing to pass down the inner arc of the Seychelles, the Amirantes, and Providence Island, to the Comoros and the Mozambique Channel approaches. They should reach the Comoros in eighty-four hours’ time — midday on the 29th.
Now they were at the equator: 0 of latitude, 56 east longitude, at the heart of the Indian Ocean.
Richard lay on his bunk fully clothed and wide awake. His shoulders were propped against the wall, feeling the easy movement of his great ship through the long ocean swells. Such was the size of her hull that Prometheus did not ride the water as a smaller ship might have done, pitching as the waves passed beneath her; but she had her own special movement and it was familiar to him now.
The last six days had laid the ghosts of the Gulf to rest. The mysteries that had seemed so important then were in their proper place at last. Occasionally they nagged at the edge of his mind, like an unsolved crossword clue, but they remained secondary, a long way behind the efficient running of his ship.