The crew’s quarters were as bad as the bridge — was there no one aboard who hadn’t eaten that accursed soup? — but, just as on the bridge, the strongest were up and about. Salah Malik and Kerem Khalil met him at the door. In the event, although three hours seemed like a long time, they only just made it.
First, the three of them — they didn’t feel like splitting up again — went down to the engine room to try to drum up another recruit or two. They were luckier here. McTavish had been in his bunk when the soup came and had only taken a sip or two before the others became ill. Martyr had used the relatively strong young Scot as a sort of work horse to help and support the rest so that the Engine Room, though it reeked disgustingly like everywhere else, was comparatively orderly. The gaunt American, like the captain, had simply refused to give in, so he was still in charge.
Rice was beginning to come out of it, so Martyr agreed to keep the piratical Welshman and release the one strong man aboard to join the deck party. McTavish himself was less than enthusiastic about going on deck — and who could blame him? — but it had to be done and these were not the circumstances to ask for volunteers. The four of them went off like intrepid paraplegics to get their wet-weather gear.
Their strength did not return miraculously. They did not stop feeling sick; the stomach cramps did not abate. Nothing got easier. But they did what had to be done, inch by inch, little by little; knowing there was no alternative and therefore never pausing to count the cost.
By the time they had got themselves ready it was nearly ten o’clock. There was no real question of checking further on the others; it was enough to ride up a couple more decks than necessary, check with Tsirtos that the tugs were on schedule, then ride back down again in the blessed lift.
They took it for granted that the helm was — at the very least — still in the hands of the indomitable Robin. With luck, they reckoned, some others up there would have pulled themselves together by now as well. And, indeed, it seemed so: for as they exited the port A deck bulkhead doorway into the terrible night, all the deck lights came on.
In out of the massive howling blackness, there still tumbled gigantic seas, rearing out of the shadows, foam-webbed but slick like the backs of incredible monsters. The cloud cover was gone, however, save for a high, light scud; and the moon and stars were out.
Once in a while, at random points all around the compass card, great bolts of lightning would plunge down, defining the inner edges of the storm. On a level that was almost subliminal, below the occasional noises close by, they could hear the insane cacophony of it — like Armageddon all around them; in the distance and coming closer.
From side to side, the storm covered more than a thousand miles. A thousand miles of towering clouds reaching from wave-top to troposphere in unbroken columns of swirling air thirty thousand feet high; a thousand miles of banshee winds gusting to one hundred and fifty miles per hour, a thousand miles of waves whipped up house-high from abyssal trough to mountainous crest.
But at the middle of the circle, at the hub of this madly whirling wheel, there was a disk of calm over one hundred miles across: the eye.
Around the outer edges of the eye the black battlements of cloud rose up. Through them the wild winds raved. Down them jumped the lightnings. Out of their foundations ran the tall, tall seas. But within them there was calm.
Down the center of Prometheus’s deck, among the pipes, fifteen feet in the unquiet air, three feet wide with railings four feet high, nine hundred feet long, there was a catwalk. There were eight steep steps up to it from the restless, foam-washed deck. Up these they went, in Indian file, Richard first and McTavish last, all hanging on to the railings for dear life. Although the wind had dropped, and the rain and clouds had gone for the time being, the sea was still running murderously high and the combination of movement and slipperiness was fatally dangerous to their weak legs and uncertain feet. Time and again one or another of them would go forward, back, to one side or the other with bone-shaking force. Elbows and knees had the flesh on them bashed away. Ribs were bruised, welted, cracked. Every few yards someone would turn and retch helplessly down onto the deck.
There was little conversation, however, until they reached the forecastle head. Then Richard said, “If they’re not here in twenty minutes or so, we’d better start back. If the storm closes down again and catches us out here in this condition, we’re dead.”
Nobody had the energy to point out that if they went back without securing the tugs’ lines before the storm hit Prometheus again, then everyone aboard was as good as dead anyway.
But as it turned out, they had no real wait at all. The tugs came scudding down from the north almost at once, exploding out of the storm wall and igniting huge halogen searchlights visible for miles.
Time, of course, was relative, especially to the men on the forecastle head. One moment it seemed that the tugs were distant; the next they were all but alongside. One moment their great searchlights were mere beams shining up from the horizon like a distant antiaircraft battery; the next they were illuminating every nut and bolt nearby and making their faces like eyeless death masks carved in ice.
Lines came aboard. Light lines caught, eventually, secured to the winches and pulled until the towing cables rose like serpents from the sea. And when the fat, strong hawsers writhed up onto the deck, they had to be secured. And so they were. It was impossible, but it was necessary. And so it was done.
But how it was done, no one could ever clearly remember.
There came a time when the lines were secure and the tugs, like tiny horses towing a huge barge, began to turn Prometheus’s head.
A time when the men stumbled back up the catwalk and into the warm bridge with the outriders of the returning storm threatening to overwhelm them at each faltering, exhausted step.
There was a time when McTavish returned to the Engine Room and Richard via the shack — where he referred laconic tug captains to the owner — to the bridge. When Salah and Kerem joined Ho and his men, beginning to tidy up.
There came a time, now the storm had returned, when Richard and Robin stood side by side at the helm while intrepid shadows moved behind them, clearing the bridge and taking the stricken down to their bunks.
There came a dream time when the storm was gone and men with broad South African accents teemed out of helicopters on the deck and took over the running of the ship, but still the captain and his third mate would not leave the helm; nor would the chief leave the Engine Room.
There came a bright, winter-clear morning, brilliant after rain; and out of the heart of the morning came South Africa, and Durban where they could safely rest at last.
PART 3
ATLANTIC
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sometimes, when conditions are right, off Cape Agulhas where Africa comes to its southernmost point forming a wedge between the oceans, there is a cliff of water. Ships going west must step down into the Atlantic. It is there because the warm Agulhas current, which sweeps constantly down the east coast, meets at this point the cold Benguela current, spawn of the perpetual West Wind Drift, which flows forever up the west coast to the equator.
At 09.00 Cape time on August 17, ten days later, Prometheus crashed forward over the twenty-foot sheer drop, causing even the sure-footed Robin Heritage to stagger.