As quickly as he could, constrained only by the need for silence, he undid all the clamps concealed by the shadow, then he slowly began moving into the light, crawling to his left, toward the starboard side, fighting to keep the hatch itself between himself and the keen-eyed man on the bridge.
Things were becoming increasingly dangerous, second by second. When he reached the point of realizing he was unlikely to walk away from this, he never knew; but the realization that he would be lucky to survive did not slow him down.
Abruptly, the hatch moved.
His heart lurched within him with enough force to wind him, like a punch in the belly. The rest of the clamps, the ones closest to the volcano-sided hole in the deck, must all have been broken by the explosion in the Pump Room.
He forced his stiff body into a crouch, and he forced his fingers under the edge of the cap.
“There!”
The cry seemed to echo over the whole anchorage. A lesser man might have frozen. Demetrios worked even more feverishly, trying to wrestle the top of the tank off. But it was no good. One man simply could not move it. Defeated at last, he left the top to itself and used one last second to tear the bomb and the remote control out of the camera case.
Then, just as the rush of feet gathered itself at his back, he leapt up onto the tank cap. He held the bomb just high enough for them to see it and pressed the ARM button. At once the digital readouts started to flash. They were red and looked every bit as dangerous as they actually were. He needed to do or say nothing further.
They gathered in a circle around him, looking up; and he was almost shocked to feel the depth of their rage, and their hatred toward him. It came up from them in waves. From every shadow-etched, black-eyed face, stained old ivory by the security lighting. He had never counted on this and it frightened him most of all, because it shocked and disoriented him. He had never really thought of them as human beings, with wishes, hopes, emotions, before. He had only ever thought of them as counters. As chess pieces to be moved about, allowed to live or sentenced to die according to the dictates of his plan. Now he saw them as they really were, as people; as human beings who abominated him for what he had done. And he could identify with them completely now, for he had become one of them — though they would never recognize the fact — destined to die with them, according to the dictates of the plan.
Richard Mariner stepped forward to face him. “You realize we are all dead if you detonate that thing?”
“Of course.” Demetrios kept his voice calm. Certain. There was no use in letting them see that he thought they had a long chance of survival. It was an incendiary, after all, designed to burn rather than to explode. It was possible that he might detonate the thing and immolate himself without setting fire to anything else.
Or on the other hand, he might set fire to the very air itself and destroy the whole of Europoort.
The second possibility abruptly became the most likely: a pungent stench of petrol fumes suddenly brought tears to his eyes. He fought for breath, keeping a close watch on them as they all fell back. But then the stench began to fade and he could breathe again.
Mariner was still talking. “Look, why don’t you just hand it over to me and we’ll talk the whole thing through…”
Demetrios gave a bark of laughter, almost a choke. The fumes had got into his lungs. Luckily the air was clearing of them at last. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. “What do you expect? A great confession? The full story? Repentance? Forget it!”
“Now, look…”
“What you don’t know now, you’ll never know!” he spat. “Now back off or I press the button!” But before he could say or do anything else, he was struck with stunning force behind the knees.
Richard had been concentrating absolutely on keeping the madman’s attention while Malik and Martyr crept round behind him, and so he saw all too clearly through the stunning flash of action that their plan was about to backfire. And it was neither of the men who tackled him after all. It was Robin. And as he fell, Demetrios pressed the button.
But Demetrios pressed the wrong button, the button that tripped a part of the bomb he did not even know existed: a small, powerful electromagnet designed to hold the device hard against any metal surface. The bomb slammed into his chest, attracted by the nearest metal — the toggle and zipper of the wetsuit. The blow from in front and the tackle from behind knocked Demetrios back. Flat on his back. His shoulders missed Robin’s horizontal body and slammed down onto the metal of the tank cap itself. And the damaged metal sheered. Before even Richard could move — and his reactions had been honed to almost superhuman speed — the ragged disk of metal had tilted and vanished, taking with it Demetrios, Robin, and the bomb down into the gas-filled ullage.
They all hurled themselves forward. Martyr was already at the edge, half hanging over the black hole, for he had thrown himself forward an instant after Robin. To the others as much as to him, Richard called: “Don’t breathe! It’s deadly!” His voice was raw, as though he had been screaming for many hours. If it was deadly up here, he was thinking, then what was it like down where Robin was?
But none of them — certainly not the canny chief — really needed reminding. They all knew the sequence that Demetrios did not. It was ingrained into every tankerman there. The sequence of hydrocarbon gas poisoning. Twenty seconds — at the most three-quarters of a minute — can render the fittest man unconscious. Four minutes after that, unless oxygen is administered, serious brain damage starts; one minute more brings death. The first and only sign is a strong smell of hydrocarbon gas, which soon fades — not because the gas has gone, but because it has destroyed the nerves in the nose.
Demetrios had smelled the gas as soon as he stepped onto the leaking tank cap. By the time he started falling, with Robin wrapped around him and the bomb still clinging to him, he was only semiconscious. And, automatically, because he was unable to think clearly, he did the most obvious thing. He took a deep breath to clear his head. His body went into spasm. His lungs automatically emptied themselves. His right hand clasped the bomb to his breast — where the gentlest movement would have freed its grasp on the zipper — and his left closed spasmodically on top of it. This time his thumb hit the DETONATE button, just as his body hit the scum-thick surface of the water, twenty feet down.
As soon as she felt the body she was holding curl into that rigid fetal position, Robin knew Demetrios was dead. There was nothing else she could do now, one way or the other, so she let go and fell free, holding her breath and praying feverishly. It was absolutely dark down here. There was no possibility of seeing anything at all. The water and the distant walls were all tar-covered. They would soak up light. Even a torch beam would vanish down here.
She had perhaps a thousandth of a second to complete these thoughts before the semisolid surface of the cargo exploded against her with unexpected violence. And the thick, icy liquid seemed to suck her down. She began to struggle at once, fighting to regain the surface, though she knew she was unlikely to do so, and even if she did, all that awaited her there was a minute or two’s pointless struggle to hold her breath followed by a choking death like the owner’s at the hands of the deadly gas.