Pulling it all back together after the disaster in the Pump Room had been oddly exhilarating. He was by no means addicted to danger but he was the sort of man who enjoyed pressure, and the fact that he managed to save the situation within forty-eight hours finally added to his overall sense of achievement. And it vindicated his decision to put Martyr aboard, knowing he could count on that strange, desperate man in ways he could count on no one else aboard. The only real professional there, doing a professional job, as Demetrios had known he would. The only one not motivated by simple greed. And, Demetrios knew, he had been lucky to have that one strong — very Strong — contact in Crewfinders. But the speed with which he had acted, with his back to the wall, simply added, in the end, to the sense of elation he felt on that afternoon after the Lutine Bell was rung, in that brief time of contentment before it all blew up in his face.
They phoned him at midnight — it must have been the early hours in London — to tell him the good news: Prometheus was coming home after all, and he realized that if she did so, he was ruined. Lost, the supertanker was worth millions; afloat, she would cost millions — there would be salvage to pay, docking charges, lawyers’ fees. And of course, the authorities would find out what was really in her cargo tanks. If she was lost, he was made. If she survived, he was ruined. Completely. Utterly.
Now here he was in Rotterdam himself, out of alternatives, with Gallaher’s second bomb. The backup he would have delivered in Durban had not things been changed so drastically. Simply blowing a hole in Prometheus wasn’t going to be any good, he calculated coldly. He had to blow her to hell and gone. He had to manufacture such a holocaust that no one would think to ask what had been in her cargo tanks.
Salah Malik stood by the wheel as the tugs brought them into Europoort. His arms were so stiff and his bandaged finger so sore, that a lengthy turn at the wheel was almost too much to ask. But his usual replacement, Kerem Khalil, was in scarcely better shape. A series of lesser seamen had stood by the rally-size helm throughout the last forty-eight hours, after John Higgins had overseen the bringing aboard of the lines from the Dutch tugs sent out when it became obvious that what was left of the ship was not going to sink. But Salah and Kerem had been there to bring her into port.
Martyr had been unconscious when they brought him up. Salah’s shoulders had almost been dislocated by the weight of the big American under the waterfall that had descended on them as they dangled at the end of the rope immediately after Prometheus broke in two. After the first full weight of it, Salah’s grip had begun to slip, his whole hand suddenly on fire. Some vagary of the massive physical laws that held them in their grasp upended them and twisted them around. Martyr’s head had smashed into the unforgiving metal wall behind them with the full weight of two bodies, knocking him out at once.
The dead weight, especially under these circumstances, would have been too much for most men. Indeed, had he been holding any other man, even Salah’s strength might have faltered. Above the sickening, choking sensation as he all but drowned in the oily deluge, he could feel the muscles of his arms and torso tearing apart. He held the clumsy, slippery bundle of Martyr’s inert body grimly, each second making him more certain that it was all a waste of time, effort, and agony. A few more moments and the chief would slip out of his crippled arms. His right hand gripped his left wrist with bruising force, but the joints in this steely circle at elbow and shoulder were slowly being pulled apart. Salah shook his head to clear his eyes and spat to clear his mouth. Then he ground his teeth together. The wings of his shoulder blades seemed to be tearing away from the muscles of his back. The whole of his torso was burning now, as though he had been severely scalded from neck to waist.
For the last time he kicked away from the black steel wall that swung toward him like an avalanche time and again. The strange forces that had been tossing the two of them around like a feather relaxed for an instant. Salah swung upright. A pause in the torrent allowed him respite to glance upward, and what he saw there gave him the one more ounce of strength he needed.
Kerem Khalil, tied into a makeshift rope sling, was abseiling down the iron precipice toward them.
Kostas Demetrios sat beneath the gentle dewfall, watching the quiet ship and wondering how best to go about destroying her.
Prometheus had to be totally destroyed — no matter what the risks to her crew, the anchorage, himself. Only an explosion followed by a massive fire would solve his problems. But he was no suicide. Nor any kind of a fool. He had no intention of being caught in the explosion if he could help it.
They had put her in the outermost of the docks, with only the headland Demetrios was crouching on separating her from the restless sea. If he followed the headland back the way he had come all those hours earlier with the Dutch sightseers, he would return to the high dock gates. Security was too tight for him there. Only by revealing himself as the owner would he get through, and even then they would probably search him — especially at this time of night. And even if they did not discover the bomb, they would certainly escort him onto the ship and then he would fall into the same trap he had almost fallen into earlier, on the dock. The slightest gesture on his part would have got him aboard. But that would have landed him with the massive salvage bill. And put him straight into the hands of the crew.
But the simple fact was that he had to go aboard somehow, to night. There was no alternative. First thing in the morning, the investigators would arrive. Investigators from Rotterdam, Lloyd’s, Scotland Yard, the FBI, and God knew where else. And the first thing they would do would be to check in the tanks. And the next thing they would do would be to come looking for him.
And the only way he could think to make good use of the bomb was to get the damn thing aboard. His only real hope was to get it somehow into the ullage where the scum from the unwashed tanks would have oozed enough lethally explosive gas to blow what was left of Prometheus apart.
And he had known in his bones for an hour and more that the only way to get across was going to be to swim. And luckily, he had come prepared even for that eventuality. He pulled out the wetsuit from on top of the bomb and started to put it on.
Richard sat in his dayroom, staring at the blank ply over his window, with Robin curled at his feet. Her shoulder rested on the right leg of the chair and her golden head rested on his thigh. She was exhausted, sound asleep. As was her father, gray with fatigue, in the owner’s suite. He was on his last legs himself, staring mindlessly at the wood with its swirls of grain like sea ribs on pale sand. He should be writing up the log. The Accident Reports. This was his first chance to do any paperwork since Bill Heritage had pulled the pair of them back aboard nearly forty-eight hours ago with Robin’s kisses still burning on his lips. That was the moment he was trying to record in the log. The power of the emotion that memory brought was all that was keeping him awake.
No. Not all that was keeping him awake. There was something else. A formless sense of something. Too imprecise even to be called a feeling. Danger. Much less powerful than the sensation that had traveled magically up through the soles of his feet as his command had begun to come apart. It was nothing he could feel, even subconsciously. It was perhaps only the feeling that it was all but over and they were safe, that feeling twisted into a worry by all that had gone before. A thought. A fear. An unprovable certainty.