Her only real hope was the knowledge that somewhere nearby, oil-covered, slippery, and probably useless, a set of steps led up from the bottom of the tank to the tank top itself. Intrepid to the last, she planned to find that flight of steps and climb to safety. She reckoned she had perhaps two minutes before her breath ran out. She had no idea that Demetrios had triggered the bomb.
Martyr straightened at once and, turning toward Richard, swung his leg over the side of the tank top. “No!” barked the captain. “I’ll go.” The chief stepped back. From twenty feet down came the double splash of two bodies hitting the filthy liquid.
Richard was speaking urgently into his R/T. “John! We need some breathing equipment down here. Now!” Then he gulped the oil-smelling air into his lungs and stepped forward.
Salah Malik rushed up to him, holding the rope that Demetrios had used to hide his hands. He glanced at his captain, who nodded. Richard had been waiting for this, not for the breathing gear. If they waited for that before he went after her, Robin wouldn’t stand a chance. Not that she stood much of a chance anyway, he calculated grimly.
Richard found the top step immediately inside the tank top and stood on it impatiently for five more seconds while Salah knotted the rope expertly around his waist, then went back to where Kerem, Ho, and some of the others had tight hold of the far end of it. Richard held his R/T out to Martyr. The big American took it and replaced it in Richard’s fist with his torch. Shining this into the pit at his feet, Richard started down. More than thirty seconds now since Robin had fallen in. Richard also started to pray.
Martyr, keeping the channel to John Higgins open, started moving back toward the bridge. Oxygen mask or Drager compressed-air gear, it didn’t matter to him: as soon as anything arrived, he was going to put it on and go down into the tank himself. If the tank, if anything, still existed. He was surprised to discover just how fiercely he cared for his captain and the girl.
One of John’s men, no longer needed on the bridge wing now, hit the emergency siren. The scream of it boomed out into the night, warning Europoort of the danger.
On the tenth step down, Richard slipped. The rope snapped taut and he swung there, still twelve feet above the surface of the cargo. He had his torch secured to his wrist with the loop at its end, so he did not drop it. Instead he hung there, watching amazedly as the wild beam flashed away into nothingness, showing him the great, flooded black cavern he was descending into. The roof of the tank stretched away above him, darker than any stormy sky. The immense cargo spread below him like a basalt ocean, the surface of it semisolid, cracked into great thick floes, like black ice. And all he had to aid his search was that puny glimmer of light. All he had for support was that treacherous, invisible, thread-thin stair. He swung until it hit him solidly on the shoulder, then he grasped it once more, and carried on down.
Five seconds later, the black sludge of the surface was sucking at his legs and there was nothing to be seen but the measureless, still, tarry crust of it. Robin must be out there somewhere, perhaps nearby. But she would be enveloped in oil sludge like a nymph in a spider’s web. He listened with desperate concentration. Was she too weighed down with the thickness of it even to move and make a sound? Heart breaking, he opened his tight-pressed lips and into that immense, tomblike silence, he called her name.
“ROBIN!”
And a bright light spread through the water, shining up through that black crust in a breathtaking array of emeralds, sapphires, and indigos. All the cargo seemed to have lit up by magic, as though, beneath the thick, floating scum of tar, a sunrise was shining through the sea, summoned by the magic of her name. And silhouetted against the brightness, surprisingly close at hand, almost indistinguishable from the black scum around it, was a human shape. Without another thought, Richard hurled himself bodily forward.
Then, incredibly, it all exploded up into a gross black fountain, sweeping him under even as he reached for her.
Sir William Heritage came panting out of the bridge-house carrying a heavy white Drager pack, completely unaware of his daughter’s terrible danger. Martyr took it at once and started to strap it on. “Get some oxygen cylinders too,” he ordered, gesturing at McTavish and the nearest stewards to go and help. “And more rope.” Then he was turning back, tightening the buckles and impatiently ripping the bandage off his battered head so he could slip the face mask on.
As he went past Salah Malik, he gave him one curt nod. That was all. No time for words. Nor any need for them. He was going down: the big Palestinian was in charge up here now.
He had just stepped onto the first rung down when the black geyser thundered up past him and hurled him back out onto the deck.
Demetrios’s bomb operated with a built-in sixty-second delay. He had hit the button during his death spasm as he hit the thick surface. The bomb, clutched to him by his dead hand, was heavy. His lungs were empty. During the next minute he sank more than sixty feet. Then the bomb detonated. It generated very little in the way of blast, but an enormous amount in the way of heat. While the seventy thousand tons of ice-cold Cape seawater with which it was surrounded soaked up an awful lot of that heat, there was still enough generated during the next incandescent seconds to set up a violent upward current. A mixture of hot water and rapidly expanding gases.
But the hot water had to travel up the best part of seventy feet to the surface, and through every one of those feet it was mixed with more cold water, so that the geyser it caused in the end, though it rose twenty-five feet at its apex, erupting straight up out of the tank top itself, was never more than tepid.
And the explosion never came.
Martyr was thrown forward over the edge of the tank top and almost swept away by the force of it, but he held himself doggedly still as the filth from the tank cascaded up and over him and sucked him toward the deck’s edge with astonishing force, and only his own iron grip saved him from tumbling overboard, down into the sea. A foul tidal wave of the stuff broke over Salah’s team, staining overalls; filling eyes, noses, and mouths; but they remained unmoving, holding on to Richard’s kicking, twisting lifeline like grim death.
When it was all relatively calm, a moment or two later, Martyr pulled himself up onto his knees and turned to look down. The tank was absolutely dark again. Only the mess all over his clothes, the Drager gear, and the deck stood as proof that the incredible had happened.
Then, close enough to make him jump and cry out, a perfectly black head thrust up over the rim, and, almost at once a second appeared.
Martyr was on his feet immediately, helping first Robin, then Richard out. And Salah Malik was by his side, frowning slightly, hands busy, still holding his breath, just in case.
Sir William joined them almost at once, stunned speechless, as they pulled his daughter and son-in-law away from the deadly hole, down toward the safety of the bridge. Salah and Sir William pulled one slack figure each, and Martyr walked hunched up between them, feeding compressed air from his own mouthpiece into their filthy mouths.
As soon as they were sure the air was safe, beside a pile of oxygen cylinders from the emergency room, they stopped and began to use artificial respiration properly, adding to their ministrations with more and more pure oxygen, until first one, then the other, coughed and started to breathe normally. By that time even John Higgins had joined them, rushing impulsively down from the bridge.
Only when he was satisfied they were breathing properly, did C. J. Martyr find the leisure to remove his Drager gear and collapse onto the deck, exhausted. Then Richard was sitting up, gulping great lungfuls of air, filling his chest until it hurt wonderfully, officially in charge again. “Better take the pair of us down to the sick bay and check us out properly,” he ordered John, first officer and medic since Ben Strong had gone to the deep six with Prometheus’s bow section.