Ben suddenly found himself flat on his back, completely ignorant of whether he had killed Robin or not. He felt as though he were attached to the wooden walkway; riveted to it: an invisible force was pressing him down so that he couldn’t make the slightest movement. Couldn’t even breathe. The breath was crushed out of him in a long, wheezing scream. As he realized the whole earthlike solidity beneath him was spinning, wheeling. That was why he couldn’t move — he was pressed into place by the unimaginable forces hurling the forward half of Prometheus to destruction.
He had time to think, Noooooooooo…
Richard and Salah, each clasping their human bundle, were thrown up and back as the companionway fell beneath them like an elevator going down. Richard’s consciousness snapped shut on the overpowering need to crush Robin to him, the need to wrap his legs as well as his arms around her, as they tumbled vertiginously. Then the rope slammed taut, winding him, while the pull of her falling body came perilously close to breaking his grip. Something slick but solid, whirling madly, crashed into him: Salah, still holding Martyr — just.
Enormous power, mostly liquid, surged over him, bringing his broken attempts at catching his breath right to the edge of drowning. Robin wriggled against him, vivid as an eel, and her arms closed around his neck, then her face was close to his, filthy, icy, running. And she was kissing him, fiercely alive. They clung to each other, held to the great stem section by the terrifyingly thin ropes, tiny bundles of life dangling against that sheer steel wall like mountaineers hanging helpless, high on a storm-lashed precipice.
The force of the storm wave tore the forward section clear, opening it on the broken hinge of the starboard safety rail. It tore loose at once, already sinking, and the great column of spray born of the massive wave joined the first arterial gush from the severed pipes in a thick, freezing Niagara down the naked steel wall that now served the aft section as a blunt bow.
Salah Malik’s team, steadied by the massive calm of Kerem Khalil and Sir William Heritage, did not flinch. Even in this most terrifying of nightmares, they hung for dear life onto the bucking, straining ropes.
They saw the air convulse with the concussion of the impact. They saw the whole vista of the deck before them twist and tilt. They saw four figures thrown back and one thrown forward toward the doomed bow. They saw the column of water rise like the hugest of breakers against the forecastle, boiling up, fanning up, exploding up over the side as the forces twisting the very air around them tossed them about in an awesome silence, like toys.
And when at last their vision cleared, all there was to see was the torn pipe ends cascading sludgy filth, the wildly twisting lines plummeting sheer from the splintered end of the catwalk, and wall after wall of black, foam-webbed water charging in toward them, breaking over something that looked for a moment like a slick black reef before it rolled over and under and was gone.
Then, for the first time in her history, slowly to begin with, like a child learning, what was left of Prometheus began to pitch, riding over the great storm seas like ships have done over all seas, down from the dawn of time.
PART 5
SAFE HAVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
They towed her into Europoort after sunset three days later, on September 13. There was a fine drizzle and a high overcast that threatened to bring the night in early, but still, it seemed, half of Rotterdam, Vlaardingen, and Schiedam were there to see her in.
First came the three tugs out of the massive shadows of the gathering dark; the great hawsers, familiar from countless TV and newspaper pictures, stretched up to the crippled giant, which even the smallest television screen had somehow been unable to dwarf. Then, like a bulk of blackness itself, storm-choppy seas thundering against the flat ram of the bow as though against a cliff, she slid into the outwash of the harbor lights. Even cut almost in half as she was, she seemed so big; even broken, she looked so solid. And there was about her still such horrendous potential for disaster.
But verdammt! said the onlookers one to another, what a crew must there be aboard to bring her safe to port! And as she detached herself from the rain-misted gloom, and, above the sheer wall of her broken bow the scarred wreck of her upper works appeared, first one or two and then all of them began to cheer and cheer.
As the evening wore on, and the lengthy business of positioning Prometheus safely in an anchorage as far from the rest of the shipping as possible, stretched out, so the crowds began to drift away. Only one or two diehards remained, and they were cleared out of the dock complex itself by the courteous but insistent security guards; and they had to content themselves with crossing to the headland opposite and watching from the hillside there.
By midnight, when Prometheus was at last in place and the tugs had cast off and sailed away, the rain had cleared and a thin mist was beginning to shroud the anchorage. Even the most intrepid of the boat watchers called it a day once the clammy tendrils began to infest the air; so at last, with his digital watch reading 00.20 local time, on the headland overlooking the anchorage, Kostas Demetrios found himself alone.
All he had to do now was to prime the bomb in his camera carryall and get it aboard the ship.
The original plan had come to him almost fully fledged when he was watching the six o’clock news one evening nearly a year ago. There had been an item on the OPEC embargo of oil to South Africa and he had said to himself, in derision, “But how can they enforce that? Jesus! They can’t even police it! Anyone can just sail right in…”
And that had been where it started.
All he needed was a tanker, enough money to fit it and run it for a few months. And a cargo of oil — which didn’t even have to belong to him, for heaven’s sake! And a crew willing to sail into Durban and sell the oil illegally.
But then what? He couldn’t bring the ship home. Not with empty tanks. No. The ship would have to sink so that no one would ever know. Which meant there would be insurance to collect on the ship…And on the cargo, because no one must ever suspect she was empty when she went down.
So: Stage One, buy, fit, insure, and crew a supertanker. He was a shipping man. He could do that.
Stage Two, contact the South Africans and agree to prices, dates, points of delivery.
Stage Three, deliver the oil and accept payment.
Stage Four, use some of the South African money to buy the now non ex is tent cargo on the international spot market. A buoyant market where prices were climbing dizzily.
Stage Five, scuttle the ship.
Stage Six, collect the insurance on his ship and his cargo — worth so much more on the day it was lost than on the day it was purchased.
And that would be that. He would have made the change. No longer would he be just a shipping man. He would be an oil man who owned his own ships.
He was awed by the simple glory of it. Why weren’t people doing this all the time? All you needed were some contacts. A little capital. But you could only do it once. And you would have to do it right: there could be no question of illegal practices to stop the insurance payments. No question of people snooping around uninvited — another good reason to buy the “cargo,” just before she sank, himself…
Well, he could sort all that out later. First, he needed a supertanker.