Peter Tonkin
The Fire Ship
For Cham and Guy
Epigraph
Fire Ship: A vessel freighted with combustibles and explosives and sent among ships, etc., to destroy them
Out of the fired ship — which by no way
But by drowning could be rescued from the flame—
Some men leaped forth
and ever as they came
Near the foe’s ships, did by their shot decay.
So all were lost which the ship were found—
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drowned.
(Slightly adapted by the author)
Chapter One
She came down from the horizon burning, pulled south across the wind by the current. She came like a ghost through a haze that the monsoon could not move. A haze that twisted her, made her seem liquid, like a slow drop of tar in a furnace running over corrugated iron.
She belched smoke and the monsoon pushed it back along her track. Every now and then it would settle wearily, to lie black and oily on the upper ocean, leaving an ugly, unnatural wake stretching roughly northward, up toward Socotra, mile after mile. Such were the vagaries of that thick wind that the smoke stayed low, as if forbidden the upper reaches, so that from a distance it remained invisible and the one thing to be seen coming over the horizon, looming out of that silver haze, was that implacable black hulk, burning, oozing southward, moved by the current alone.
“There she is!” called Robin, who had the keenest eyes of the four of them. Then, “No, but…”
“Yes!” confirmed Richard at once, seeing the burning freighter in the blinding distance.
“Dead ahead,” chimed in Hood, shading his eyes with a square, black hand.
“Steady as we go, then,” concluded Weary, who held the great spoked helm, the four of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the cockpit, looking forward.
Katapult skimmed northward like a gull, a thing of the wind, immune, unlike the other ship, to the rogue current running counter.
“Better tell him we can see him,” commanded Richard and Weary together, then the Englishman, Richard, turned away with a self-deprecating grin, unused to the fact that he was not in command here. The Australian, Weary, finished the command without pause: “Tell the freighter we have him in sight, Sam.”
Sam Hood nodded his understanding, his strong brown fingers already busy at the transmitter. He had broadcast at frequent intervals during their approach, ever since they picked up the first “Mayday!” twelve hours ago, but had received little beyond the distress calls, and, since noon, nothing. “Think there’s anyone left aboard?” Robin asked abruptly, her clipped English tones drowning Hood’s drawl. Richard shrugged and put a broad hand on her shoulder, sharing her concern in silence.
“Soon find out,” answered Weary. “She’s coming down on us fast enough.”
They were running across the wind, at an angle calculated by Weary to bring them in on this tack. Richard Mariner, a sailor since his late teens and a senior captain these twenty years and more, marveled again at the ease and speed of the craft. Katapult. Her name was a play on words. “Kat” for her multihull configuration and “Katapult” for her speed. But she was neither catamaran nor trimaran — more like something in between. She had a long, needle-sleek hull with two submerged outriggers to stabilize the reach of her mast and the weight of her sails. A computer monitored the course, the angle and force of the wind of those great, ribbed sails, then dictated the horizontal angle of the outriggers to the hull so that Katapult always moved with maximum velocity and minimum draft unless the hand at the helm dictated otherwise. She was as experimental as she was beautiful and had fascinated Richard and Robin when they first saw her so entirely that they would have arranged a trial sail in her somehow, even had their holiday plans on Silhouette Island not changed so dramatically.
Hood glanced up at his friend and colleague, the Australian, Doc Weary. “No answer, Doc,” he said. “Either there’s no one aboard, or they can’t hear us.”
Weary’s massive head tilted back as the Australian squinted up past the curved white blade of the mainsail to the communications aerial, extending the broad aerofoil mast nearly eighty feet above. Of all the high-tech equipment onboard, Doc seemed least happy with that, thought Richard. Perhaps because it was about the only part of Katapult neither he nor Hood had built.
“ ‘S all still there,” he informed Hood, his flat tone and Sydney accent in marked contrast to the American’s. “They must have heard you.”
They were an odd pair, mused Richard. Held together by bonds so deep that neither he nor Robin — who was so much better at that sort of thing — had been able to fathom them. They were both big men, but apart from their size, Sam Hood and Doc Weary presented a complete contrast. Hood was an automobile-assembly-line worker from Detroit. He seemed to have little formal education, but his fingers understood all things mechanical and electrical from the simplest motor to the most complex microprocessor. Doc also fitted no conventional pattern. His long fair mane, bound back from his forehead by an apparently immovable sweatband, seemed to enlarge an already massive head. Sitting foursquare on his thick neck and broad torso, it gave an impression of huge physical power at odds with the delicacy of those artistic hands and the fastidious intellect that guided them. Robin had managed to discover, though neither man boasted of the fact, that Weary had earned his nickname because he had been the only Ph.D. in his platoon in Vietnam, where Weary and Hood had first met.
Robin.
At the thought of her, Richard, smiling, turned his gaze across to his vital, beloved wife. She stood, reedthin, five feet eight inches of vibrant energy, blonde, almost luminescent in the brightness. The intensity of his feeling for her filled him to bursting, as it often did, though Richard, perfectly English in this as in most things, rarely put his emotions on parade. She was concentrating absolutely on the black hulk of the freighter. The sight of the ship was now so important because her radio remained silent. Richard put all other thoughts from his mind and followed his wife’s gaze. Were there any crewmen scaling down the hot black cliffs of her sides? Was there wreckage around bearing survivors? Were there lifeboats nearby? Which parts of her were ablaze? Was there anything clearly warning of danger — more than was apparent from her condition? Both he and Robin had painfully acquired experience in this field nearly ten years ago now — they had abandoned the first ship they had served on together, the supertanker Prometheus, when it had caught fire in these latitudes on the other side of Africa.
As far as Richard could see, this ship was an utterly undistinguished tramp. She was of the timeless “three castle” design with raised sections fore and aft and a bridge-house midships. She seemed ageless: Conrad could have sailed in her — but no one else ever would. Much of the forecastle head, he now could see, was blown away. Her old-fashioned, nearly vertical bow rose from the restless sea perhaps ten sheer, sharp feet to a wreck instead of a point. Twisted metal reached out as though the forecastle were bursting into flower. No mere collision could have done that. Farther back in the well of the foredeck, black smoke collected, solid enough, seemingly, to be contained by the deck rails and to pile itself up the bridgefront before sliding sluggishly overboard. The bridge-house was a mess. Originally white, it was now a ghastly gray. Behind windows gaping between shards of shattered glass, flames flickered madly. The wind down which Katapult was riding pushed the smoke back above it all like thick, oily black hair. The clarity with which that gray death mask was revealed allowed Richard a shock of realization. His generation of Englishmen had been to war only briefly, in the Falklands, but he knew its effect well enough. He called, “Hood! She’s been strafed. Check the radar for planes.”