Heritage Mariner maintained an office in Manama, but it was one of three in the United Arab Emirates and the one man who ran them all — Angus El Kebir — was in Dubai at the moment.
Perhaps he had better get a cab.
Lost in memories of times long past when he had first got to know this island, when Muharraq was primarily an RAF base with a few little independent airlines shuttling supplies from one airfield to another, when old Neville Shute — Neville Norway, his real name — was out here working on his novel Round the Bend, when there had been a real sense of adventure to the Gulf, Bill Heritage drifted out into the stultifying night, carrying his own case, looking for a cab. He failed to hear his name being called over the announcement system. He paid no attention to the limousine with its CD license plates that had actually come to meet him. As he had done countless times before, he raised his hand to the driver of one of the great yellow Cadillac taxis and it pulled over to the curb beside him. He opened the back door and slung his baggage in before the driver could offer help. He climbed in after it. “Manama, please,” he said. “The Hilton, on Government Road…”
But even before he could finish his directions, the door he was closing was torn open again and he had one stunned glimpse of a shadowed body in battle fa- tigues with a bright checked kaffiyah folded across its nose and mouth looming over him.
Beirut. He had to be in Beirut. That was all he could think. There was nothing in the room except the bed, a table, and a rickety chair. There were no identifiable sounds from outside. Nothing except a continuous, muffled, distant roar, but it sounded like traffic. Or artillery.
Perhaps when someone came he would learn more — but he doubted it. He had awoken in this dark room some unspecified time ago, in his shirtsleeves and trousers but with no shoes, no braces or belt, no watch, no luggage. It was dark, but only because there were no windows. He had groped his way to the bed, the table, the chair, the door. He had stood on the chair and searched high up on the walls. He had stood on the table and discovered nothing but an unyielding ceiling. He had listened at the door. Again he had heard only the distant roar. Now he lay on the bed and thought. He had been kidnapped. Certainly by Arab terrorists. Probably by the same Arab terrorists who held Prometheus. Which made it all look less like Bull’s “diplomatic traffic accident” after all. Yet he was not onboard Prometheus. He was not on a ship at all — there was no hum of alternators, no movement over the sea. And he was still in the Middle East; the temperature told him that. The heat confirmed it.
Christ! He hoped Helen wouldn’t worry too much.
Better not to think about that. Better not to think too much at all, actually.
Beirut seemed the best guess then. No doubt he would have plenty of time to test his hypothesis further.
Chapter Four
“Give me the binoculars,” Robin demanded, her voice suddenly tense.
Richard didn’t hear her. Just at the moment she spoke, a sound, something more felt than heard, rumbled in his ears, distracting his attention from her and from his watch. He moved his head, concentrating on the sinister vibration in the air. Was it distant thunder? Was it something nearer, more threatening? He didn’t like it, whatever it was. He glanced up along the spotted skin of the fully extended sail to the blast-damaged wreck at the masthead: perhaps there was something wrong there. Weary hadn’t trusted that masthead even before flying debris had destroyed it all those hours ago during the destruction of that nameless ship, wrecking their communications equipment, necessitating the careful watch Robin and he were now keeping, perhaps doing more dangerous damage besides. Then Robin called again and he concentrated on her instead. “What did you say, darling?”
“Give me the binoculars. There’s something out there.”
He reached down into the rack where the field glasses were kept and gritted his teeth as the ache in his swol- len elbow, like the damaged masthead a relic of the freighter’s death, flared into pain.
“Here.” He handed them up to her. She slung them round her neck, then gripped the glass windscreen by his head to steady herself. She carefully rearranged her stiff body until she was kneeling, painfully twisted to allow for the angle of Katapult’s deck.
Richard strained to follow the direction of her gaze, but he could see nothing. The ocean continued to come at them in an unvarying series of waves, each one banded like the one before with the faint, curving slick of oil they were still following. About ten yards wide and God alone knew how long, it stretched back like a ghostly, humpbacked road into the haze.
“Anything?”
They were speaking in hushed monosyllables not only because of fatigue. Robin had been sitting up on the cabin roof watching for hours in silence. Richard had the helm because he could stand easily where she could not. Hood and Weary were asleep below, Hood with a cracked rib and Weary with a great welt across the back of his skull. None of them had come through the explosion unscathed. Even crouching all together on the cockpit’s floor they had each been hurt in one way or another by that hard, hot rain of debris.
The subliminal rumble, half sound, half sensation, came again. Richard checked the damaged topworks once more. Letting his eyes follow the curved sails down, along the blade of the mast to the ball-and-socket joint where the whole mast sat in its steel mast-foot, just below the swellings that housed the retractable telescopic booms, three feet above the deck. He knew the mast was stepped in a ring of steel embracing the central hull at this point. Could there be anything wrong there? He frowned, trying to pick up that sound again.
Robin screwed the eyepieces of the binoculars into her eye sockets; they seemed to magnify the blinding dazzle without helping her to see farther at all. She dropped them and brushed the sweat out of her eyes with unaccustomed anger. Somehow, during the mayhem that had come so close to destroying even Katapult, all the men had ended up in a huddle on top of her. Their wounds were due to flying debris — her painfully twisted knee was due to their clumsy attempts at gallantry. She didn’t know whether she was more vexed with them for hurting her or with herself for being so ungrateful.
Katapult smashed into a breaking crest and leaped playfully with what sounded like a roar of joy. She flexed automatically and gasped in pain. God! What a bunch of schoolboys! Here she was, perfectly capable of looking after herself, trying to maintain the last of her independence before motherhood shackled her down, and she found herself surrounded by a would-be James Bond and the Macho Twins. Great!
She pushed the binoculars back under her brows and suddenly forgot all about her rage. There it was — in full view, surprisingly close at hand. She fine-focused automatically, her breath suddenly short with excitement. Oil-smeared, battered, perhaps empty, certainly showing no sign of life at the moment, but at the near edge of the oil-track, thank God, it was less than a mile away.
“Richard, come starboard a point or two. There’s a lifeboat less than a mile ahead.”
“Any sign of life?” His excited voice lost in the rumble of a wave against Katapult’s flank.
Robin was scanning it carefully now. The ravaged lifeboat was low in the water, floating at a strange angle. One gunwale of the boat was lower than the other so that it showed one side, but not its contents. Beyond that, nothing seemed wrong. Perhaps there was someone lying over on the lifeboat’s port side. Several people, their weight distributed unevenly, might make it ride like that. But Robin wasn’t convinced, her initial feeling of excitement killed by her common sense. More likely it was the wind playing tricks with an empty hull. Robin noticed the wind was freshening, pushing Katapult over more. Her starboard outrigger sank deeper, the narrow delta of the aquadynamic composite down deep enough to gain a green tinge from the foundations of a glassy wave. The threatening wind made Robin glance down from the lifeboat to consider the craft she was riding on. Katapult’s two outriggers curved out and forward athwart the raked mast plunging past hinges, where the shrouds were tethered, to enter the water on either side of Katapult’s lean central hull. Deep below the surface, the outriggers spread into two Concorde shapes that cut through the sea as efficiently as that great airplane hurtled through the sky, their angles controlled by the computer controlling Katapult herself. At the moment the electronic system kept her steady in the face of the freshening wind and the threatening chop.