They were all so lost in their thoughts and the sheer scale of the tanker that they paid scant attention to the helicopter buzzing busily toward them low over the swells of its wake. Skipping over the sea it came, sullen sunlight blazing off the domed perspex of its windows. Only when the purposeful line of its flight path became obvious did Robin stir. “Hey,” she said. “Richard, are they coming over to us?”
“I believe they are…” Richard glanced over at Weary and Hood. They were both standing beside the wheel though neither of them had a hand on it—Katapult dead in the water until the tanker passed and the wind returned.
“Ahoy, Katapult.” The cry was almost lost in the helicopter’s own engine noise. None of them replied. The helicopter dropped its pert nose and arced toward them like a guided missile, darkening the water with the wind of its passage.
“Better get the sails off her, I think,” said Richard. Weary’s hand moved. The whine of the sail-furler began and was lost at once.
“AHOY, KATAPULT. IS CAPTAIN MARINER ABOARD?”
“HERE!” cried Richard and Robin together. They both held captain’s papers. They both waved. The helicopter bore U.S. Navy markings — perhaps they were going to talk to Admiral Stark after all.
Within moments the helicopter was hovering little more than mast high above them, Katapult stirring uneasily in the downwash of the rotors. But the chopper had ridden over on the first breeze from behind the tanker and Weary let her head fall away until the wind was dead astern and the craft was sitting more comfortably.
Then, abruptly, there came a whine from the helicopter’s side high above. Something was being lowered toward them.
Richard leaped up onto the after-section of the deck and stood there, looking up, his eyes shaded against the glare. It was a harness on a long line. He caught it easily and strapped it around his torso with practiced ease. Then he paused.
Robin knelt on the bench looking back at him, thinking inconsequentially how romantic he was in his whites, legs spread against Katapult’s action, shirt collar up, crisp cotton molded to his lean, firm body by the wind, hair tousled wildly by the thundering gale of it. He grinned wolfishly at her — his first smile since the news had come in. He simply couldn’t resist: this was his idea of really good fun. For a moment it had managed to overcome that huge anger she had felt growing in him day by day since Angus had broken the news about her father and their ship. Emotion brought tears to her eyes and when he opened his arms she ran to him thinking only to hug him to her as tightly as possible.
He said something to her the moment their bodies met but his mouth was full of her hair and it sounded simply like, “Syrup.”
Syrupy or not, she thought fiercely, I love you, Richard Mariner; and she hugged him until her shoulder joints popped. There was a click and a sudden pressure in the small of her back.
“Stand in the stirrup,” he yelled again, and, an intrepid horsewoman since her youth, she kicked her foot into the dangling metal automatically.
“Okay!” bellowed Richard, and they swung up and out.
She glanced down once, understanding, to see Katapult falling, spinning away on the silver, white-webbed sea. Then she buried her face in Richard’s chest and waited to be pulled aboard the helicopter.
As soon as the harness was unbuckled, Robin was off. She loved helicopters and, while Richard was content with his licenses to drive cars and command ships, Robin also held current licenses to fly small planes and helicopters, too. “Okay if I go on up?” she asked the bemused Navy man who had pulled them aboard. He nodded, still helping Richard with the straps and buckles, but she was already gone to crouch between the pilots’ seats, eyes avidly scanning the instruments and the view.
The monsoon closed around them at once, buffeting the little craft, causing it to swoop and dance, wrapping it in dazzling mist. Automatically Robin pulled out her sunglasses — a battered pair of flyer’s glasses with silvered mirror lenses — and slipped them on her nose. She didn’t even notice that the pilot and copilot wore identical protection. She crouched between them for all the world as though she really belonged there, a part of the crew herself.
Unlike Robin, Richard was glad to jump out of the helicopter onto the blustery afterdeck of the Mississippi. The sheer size of the old American warship almost tamed the monsoon seas she was steaming across, but every now and then a trough would take her head and she would dip and roll, pitch and heave in a corkscrew motion, shouldering off a great hissing glacier of foam. It was quite enough to unsettle some of the nearby sailors, who glanced almost enviously at the rock-steady progress of the nearby tankers, but not enough to complicate the landing or to slow the Mariners as they ran after their escort up toward the steel-gray mountain of the bridge-house.
Admiral Walter Stark received them in his office. The three of them had first met five years ago in Cannes where his California-class cruiser Baton Rouge, then part of the Mediterranean fleet, had been welcoming visitors aboard. But they had known each other for much longer — ever since Bob Stark, his favorite nephew and godson, had joined the Heritage Mariner fleet as an engineer.
“Robin. Richard.” He rose and strode toward them from behind his tidily piled desk as soon as they came through the door. “This is a bad business in every way!” His square, craggy face was lined with concern. His intelligent, deep-set brown eyes full of sympathy. He had known Sir William Heritage since soon after the Second World War. His involvement in the affair could hardly have been more personal.
“Walt,” Richard said, shaking the American’s broad hand while Robin went on tiptoe to kiss his weathered cheek. Then the admiral’s eyes met those of their escort and the young officer was gone at once.
“Sit down, sit down. My steward’ll be in with coffee in a moment. I’d like to invite you to lunch, but if I did, God knows it’d be a long flight back to Katapult.”
Richard sat, suddenly almost overcome by the sensations of being back aboard a great steel-sided ship. Katapult for the last few days had been all rush and hiss, the slightest vibration of sleek multihull through water, the rumble of her sails and the song of the wind in her stays. Mississippi was all throb and thrust — that corkscrew stagger in place of Katapult’s leap, the distant, unvarying rumble of the engine, the insistent, immediate throb of everything around him.
A sharp tap on the door preceded the entry of a lean young man bearing a trayful of cups and saucers. He swayed easily across to the admiral’s desk as Mississippi shuddered, apparently quite at ease while she dipped and heaved back; but when Robin accepted her coffee, she noticed a drop or two had been spilled and the simple fact of this brought to her mind Twelve Toes Ho, chief steward on Prometheus, a man who had never, to her knowledge, spilled a drop of anything he had ever carried. A man now, with all the others, held captive like her father. Perhaps even alongside her father. Her cheeks flushed with ill-contained rage. Her hands shook.
“Right,” said Admiral Stark as the steward closed the door. “Update. No change in your situation that I’m aware of. Helen Dufour at Heritage House in London still has no news of your father, Robin. Nobody has, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has his ear pretty close to the ground, so I’m told. Nobody knows where Bill is or who’s holding him. Beirut still seems the best bet, but the PLO isn’t talking and not even the Shi’ites are claiming any responsibility. We just have to hang on in there and wait.”