She had crept up to catch them unawares, because the watch had been watching the sharks or each other and not the horizons, and because she was moving in silence like a ghost, like the Flying Dutchman sailing north. Drifting without her engines. Safe, with the fire out.
Robin rose and followed his gaze the second she realized he had frozen where he stood. So it was she who had whispered, horror-struck, “Look!”
One by one, it seemed, they turned, and an awed murmur went through them like a breeze through dried grass. They watched in scarce-believing silence, each a prey to myriad conflicting emotions, as Prometheus, back from the dead, drifted down on them.
All of a sudden, Richard, for all his misgivings, was possessed of a fierce joy; an immense feeling of the goodness of life filled every fiber of his lean, hard body. It was one of those moments that come to men and women when they know without a shadow of a doubt that what faces them, no matter how daunting, is the task that they above all others were put upon earth to overcome.
Still standing, he began to speak, his ringing tones dragging their eyes back from the silent ship to their shining captain, outlined in fire by the setting sun. “At least one person here doesn’t want us to go back aboard: the person who sees Prometheus as what she was always meant to be: a coffin ship. A worthless hulk brought cheaply up to scratch so that she can be lost at sea as part of an insurance fraud. There is someone among us, perhaps more than one person, who knows she cannot be allowed to come safe to port in Rotterdam. And I believe that behind this person, behind the whole sickening mess, stands the owner, Kostas Demetrios, involved in an act of fraud. Nothing else makes sense.
“But Prometheus is my command and I will bring her home, to expose the fraud. I will bring her home for my father-in-law whose oil fills her holds and who stands to lose everything if I do not. I will bring her home for us, who have been cheated, tricked, lied to, and killed to make a rich man richer. And I will bring her home for herself, because she is not a worthless hulk but a great lady: perhaps the greatest I have ever sailed aboard, and I will not let her die.
“So I’m giving any secret enemies in our midst fair warning. I’m taking my Prometheus home come hell or high water. And the only way you’ll stop me is to kill me.”
Robin, still on her feet in her boat beside him, added dryly, “And me.” Her narrowed eyes raked the boat and a shark’s back rumbled against the keel. Then Ben was up, and John and all the rest of them, crazily, carried away, cheering once more until the boats began to rock dangerously and they had to sit down.
When the cheering died, Richard sat at his helm once more and led them past the lazily cruising sharks, back toward Prometheus.
As they drew closer, however, their buoyant confidence began to diminish under her icy air of desolation. It was all too easy to see the ghosts of their dead friends and enemies in the shadows gathered behind her shattered windows. It was hard not to hear them whisper in the lapping wavelets against the black precipices of her leeward side or in the thunder of surf as the occasional roller broke against the iron cliff of her windward side. The rapidly gathering dark brought with it a chill after the clear, hot day; a chill that seemed to emanate from her, making her strange to them and eerily forbidding.
Quietly, a little nervously, they came down her leeward side, under the accommodation ladder folded level with the deck almost fifty feet sheer above their heads. They snugged the heads of their boats at the exact point where Richard had held his more than three days ago, waiting for the last search party to come off, down the rope ladder.
But the ladder was gone.
They continued around, to the windward side of the silent, forbidding hulk. But that, too, was empty — there was no other way to scale her sheer sides.
Richard watched the pale afterglow of sunset, deep in thought. This was going to be even more difficult than he had anticipated. He had assumed the ladder would still be in place and had planned to send the engineering officers up it to restart the generators so the accommodation ladder could be lowered for the rest of them. They had to use the accommodation ladder somewhere in the scheme because they would never get the wounded up otherwise. It had been all very well helping them down rope ladders in the emergency of the fire when there had been no alternative — and when several had fallen into the water anyway; but expecting them to climb one now — even had there been one — with the hungry sharks waiting for one wrong move, was simply out of the question.
But now it looked as though he was going to have to come up with some alternative. And fast.
More to keep them occupied than because he thought they had missed anything on the first circuit, he moved the lifeboat forward and began another circuit of the forbidding ship.
The air of desolation had been depressing when they first approached her. Now it was overpowering. The last light of the brief tropical evening gleamed on her upper bridge works. All the rest was fast-thickening gloom. In almost shuddering silence they rounded her stem, innocent now of bow wave as she drifted without headway on the gray-black sea. They went wide enough to look up the full length of her just as the last light left her, leaving the scarred bridge gray as a corpse’s face.
The crystal beauty of the night, star-bright in the east already, only served to make her look worse by comparison, and the lightest breeze, blowing over them toward Africa, suddenly brought the charnel stench of her, an overpowering amalgam of burned steel and blown flesh.
One of the stewards leaned shakily over the side and began to vomit. The others were muttering ner vous ly, overcome by her unexpected hostility. The air of tension became almost palpable.
So that several of them actually cried out with shock when, just at the very moment they were passing underneath it, the accommodation ladder jumped noisily into motion and, apparently under its own sinister volition, hissed out and down to meet them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Martyr woke up in hell. A New Englander, born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, he had a clear idea what hell would be like — it would be a hot place, full of pain. It would be filled with the roaring of those eternal fires whose stench would make breathing another agony. Shafts of firelight would gleam through billows of acrid smoke like the livid glow of a distant furnace. Hell would be full of caverns — perhaps as many as there were mansions in heaven — and in each cavern would be a soul like his own, condemned to roast forever on the hot metal floor.
He sat up and his head swam, pulling him back to a nauseous reality. He rested for a few moments, gathering his strength. Then he tried to stand. His first attempt wasn’t too successful. He staggered like a terminal drunkard until his feet crunched on something unexpectedly and the surprise made him lose his footing again.
Sitting on the floor, he explored in the darkness with his fingers, trying to find what had caused him to fall. It was the broken torch. More than broken, by the feel of it: smashed to pieces. The memory flashed into his head of a figure cloaked in darkness behind a blaze of light, throwing itself at him, wrestling him down, bludgeoning him about the head in the shadows with a torch.
Rage came. Sheer, overwhelming, bone-deep, blood-hot red rage.
It was a feeling he knew well. It was part of him more than any other feeling in the world. “I’ll get you, you son of a bitch,” he said. And the rage gave him the strength to stand.