Bob Stark was a different kettle of fish. With his American film-star good looks, his Ivy League education, and his New England old-money family background, you expected to find him following in his father’s footsteps into politics. Or at least his uncle’s into the American Navy. But no. A love of marine engines and some vagaries of maritime chance had brought him to Heritage Mariner and he was content, for the moment, to remain. His photograph looked up at Angus quizzically, almost as though its subject had been surprised when it was taken. His blond eyebrows met the strawcolored cowlick, his eyes held an expression almost of incredulity. You expected a long straw to be dangling from the corner of that wide mouth, held firmly by a combination of those dazzling teeth and that square, impossibly wide jaw. Even from a far-faxed Polaroid, the charm of the man leaped out at you.
And Asha. He had known her only briefly, but had been as severely smitten as the other two. The facts in her file were scanty enough, names of parents in Dahran up the coast. Date of birth. Mention of a twin sister, Fatima. Education in England. Medical qualification in Edinburgh. Marriage to and divorce from Giles Quartermaine, the famous journalist. Russet eyes looked up at him from under hair as red as his own, but darker, richer. He threw the file away across the desk, unable to stand having her gaze upon him when she was in trouble and he was powerless to help.
And the action brought to his attention something that he had failed to notice until now. At the bottom of the pile was one extra file, fatter than the others. Without further thought, he opened it and confronted himself with a photograph of the man he most respected in the world, after Richard Mariner. Sir William Heritage stared out of the old monochrome picture as though carved in granite, thin hair swept straight back, thin mouth uncompromising under the white clipped mustache. Proud eyes staring out of the photo, unflinching.
Angus drove his fist down again, and was surprised to discover that he was now holding a paper knife in it. The blunt brass point stabbed through the leather of his desktop, through the backing, glue, and mahogany. Oddly, the desk had been a gift from Sir William many years ago and the fact that he had defaced it now, for such a reason, was the last straw. Had his anger been hot before, now it was incandescent. And it was the merest candle flame, he acutely suspected, beside what Richard and Robin would be feeling.
Without further thought, he leaned forward and lifted the phone beside the still-quivering handle of the upright paper knife. “Get the international operator,” he ordered. “First I want to speak to New York. Then I want Beirut.”
Chapter Six
They raced northeast at full speed, almost blind in the haze at the northernmost edge of the monsoon. Then Weary spun onto a new tack and they exploded out of a silver mist-wall into clear, calm air, straight under the bows of the USS Mississippi.
It was stunningly sudden. One moment the multihull was hurling forward at incredible velocity in the deafening, blinding maelstrom. The next moment, even as the new tack began, the air was still, crystal, and furnacehot around them. The sea was choppy and mercuric, as though contained, boiling, in the crucible of the desert. And, approaching them at flank speed across it, warning sirens howling, came the great gray leviathan Iowa-class flagship of the American Sixth Fleet.
Weary froze, looking up at it. Richard, providentially beside him, drove the wheel to port, sending Katapult skipping out of the battleship’s way, over the confusion of wavelets toward Rass al Hadd.
The Mississippi’s cutwater sliced past Katapult’s stern. The sea heaved around the warship’s massive flanks and threw Katapult out of the way, then spread in a widening chevron, the largest waves in the choppy sea. In series to the east of her reached the ships under her command, all of them racing in perfect formation dead south, whence Katapult had just come.
And even as the four of them, frozen in the cockpit, stared, the American Sixth Fleet vanished into the haze they had just emerged from, and, but for the patterns in the water, it was as though the lean warships had never existed. As though Katapult had always been alone here, drifting northeast across the restless chop in the humid heat, slack sails searching for a breath of breeze in the thick, hot air.
“Christ!” blasphemed Weary, disgusted. “That was too close!”
Hood’s hand slapped down on the radio and it suddenly jumped to life, emitting a frenzied shriek, which, had it come scant seconds earlier, would have warned them of their danger. The radio had been fading in and out for some time now. They had given up trying to regain contact with Angus El Kebir but had been relying on it as a makeshift substitute for their damaged radar and communications equipment by picking up any strong signals from ships in the vicinity. A reliance obviously misplaced.
Weary took the wheel back from Richard and swung Katapult’s eye a degree or two north. At once, almost as though his casual action had summoned it, a sluggish breeze kicked in behind them and an air of purpose returned to the sleek craft even as she wallowed over the last heave of Mississippi’s wake.
“We should have stopped her,” observed Richard, half seriously.
Robin nodded, following his thoughts with ease. The American admiral, officer commanding that fleet, was uncle and godfather to Bob Stark, Prometheus’s kidnapped chief engineer. But they already knew, from Angus’s increasingly faint messages over the last thirty-six hours, that even closer family ties than that had failed to influence State’s current policy of noninterference in the Gulf. Bob Stark’s father, senior senator from Massachusetts and close friend to the President himself, had been met with charm, sympathy, and cold comfort at the White House.
A brittle calm descended on Katapult’s cockpit, compounded of reaction to the shock of near-collision, a corrosive feeling of helplessness and — in contrast — a sense of having taken one small step toward some as yet undefined goal. It was a strange, undecided sensation that accorded well with this unsettling sea.
Away southwest across the inshore traffic zones, the great red cliffs of Rass al Hadd wheeled aft as Katapult swung in toward the coast away from the busy deepwater sea lanes, and the long black hull of a supertanker, low and fully laden, loomed over the northern horizon, more like a force of nature than a man-made thing.
Then, “There’s another one dead aft as well,” called Robin softly, and all except Weary glanced back to see the still-shimmering mist-wall part like a curtain as the mountainous jut of another, unladen, tanker’s stem thrust out toward them, surprisingly close at hand. Awed by the massiveness of it, they watched as the VLCC gathered itself inexorably out of the haze. The first twenty vertical feet of its side, nearest the water, was dull rust red and banded with vague lading marks up to the sickly green of the Plimsoll line. The next forty feet were dead black, a basalt cliff thrusting through the sea. And when her bridge solidified out of the blinding mist, like a pallid block of flats seven clear stories above that, even the eighty sheer feet of Katapult’s mast was dwarfed.
At once the wind died, blocked by the massive bulk, leaving them to wallow once more, telltales drooping dejectedly, in the doldrums of its huge wind shadow. Richard found himself shivering. From down here the sheer size of this machine — whose length could be measured in quarters of miles and whose height above the waterline could be counted in skyscraper stories and whose displacement could be weighed in quarters of millions of tons — was simply terrifying. He thought of the story he had so glibly told Hood about the felucca found wedged across the bows of his own tanker, the first Prometheus, and he remembered how they hadn’t even felt the impact of collision.