“But it has to be tied to the taking of Prometheus!” exploded Robin. “Nothing else makes any sense!”
“I agree with that,” snapped Richard. “We’ve been over and over this endlessly. It has to be part of a concerted effort. Blackmail of some kind.”
“But who by?” asked the admiral, his quiet drawl gentle, soothing the English couple’s too-evident anger. “And to what end? What have you got that someone wants that badly? Who wants to hurt you and your company like this?”
“It could be anything, it could be nothing.” Robin now, reiterating parts of conversations shared with Richard, Hood, and Weary during the long haul north to Rass al Hadd. “If it was just one of them — either Prometheus or my father — then it might be bad luck. Nothing aimed specifically at us at all. But both together — there has to be a pattern.”
“Any more news about Prometheus?” asked Richard as soon as Robin fell silent.
“Nary a word. She’s been moved down the Gulf away from the shipping at Kharg Island. The last report I had was that she was in that little bay just north of Bushehr. Anchored in five to ten fathoms, according to my charts.” He gestured to the desk and Richard suddenly realized the chart was laid out there, ready to be consulted. But he had a chart of the Gulf in his head as accurate as any on paper. As he got up, he said, “That’s what, two hundred miles due north of Bahrain?”
“One hundred and eighty-five miles due north of Manama Harbor,” said Robin, already at Walt’s shoulder, poring over the chart that was so much more up-to-date than the one in Katapult’s cabin: and it did have Prometheus’s present whereabouts precisely plotted on it, observed Richard as he joined them. Just on the edge of the bay there, under the eyes of the little Iranian airport — though there was no proof of any Iranian involvement or even suggestion of it, so far. As the admiral had said, anchored in about fifty feet of water.
Unladen then, almost certainly. Sitting high and hard to get aboard. Damned hard for armed men to board unsuspected…
He glanced up and found both of them watching him, gray eyes and brown eyes alike alive with speculation. Mississippi corkscrewed. Foam thundered back along her starboard foredeck. Spray splattered onto the porthole glass beside him and foam hissed away into the scuppers. “If we could get aboard Prometheus, then we could begin to find out what is really going on,” he said. His voice was flat. Level. The throb of his rage just held in check by an iron effort of will.
Richard was fiercely aware that they were actually discussing a kind of war. A small war against an unknown enemy, waged by himself and such warriors as he could summon, fought with such weapons as he and they could find, against such armaments as the terrorists might hold, and to be fought on the decks of the flagship of his tanker fleet with more at risk than he dared to calculate.
“My hands are tied,” warned Admiral Stark. “No men or matériel. Not a gun. Not a round.”
“Radio?” asked Robin. “Our first meeting off Rass al Hadd should prove to you what a danger to shipping we are in our present state.”
“Done!” Stark grinned. His eyes, the image of his godson’s, sparkled with fierce joy at being able to help after all. “And now you come to mention it…”
Half an hour later, Walter Stark’s desk was piled high with the sort of equipment the enthusiastic, safety-conscious admiral thought to be essential for the protection of Katapult in her present condition from the dangers of shipping in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf.
A powerful, reliable radio. A portable switchboard with several portable VHF radiotelephone handsets. A sextant, very nearly the work of art that Richard remembered John Higgins always kept aboard Prometheus, and the admiral’s own since boyhood. A full range of charts, notices to mariners, and updates.
Stark surveyed the pile, then looked up cheerfully, catching the eye of the President’s portrait on the wall above the desk. Richard and Robin followed his gaze. “You know,” said the admiral, “I’ve a feeling he’s watching us fairly closely. Maybe I should have turned his picture to the wall…”—he rubbed his great, hard hands gleefully—“…but I’ll be damned if I think he would mind!”
“So there are four of us,” Richard was summing up after two long days’ worth of arguments. “Although for the life of me I don’t see why you and Doc want in on this, Sam.”
Hood, down in the cabin, hunched over his new toys, simply shrugged. Doc pretended not to hear, his eyes on the far horizon, the helm easy in his great hands.
“We’ve enough equipment to navigate to the moon…”
“Mars, if’n we want,” interjected Hood happily.
“…and back. One experimental trimaran, almost fully functional…”
“We can fix the radar easy given the equipment and the time,” said Weary. “Rest of the stuff’s fine.”
“…and six Kalashnikhov AK-47 assault rifles, old but unused,” Richard persisted.
“Fine guns,” said Robin. “Tough. Reliable.”
“And with this we propose to engage an unnumbered quantity of armed terrorists, possibly the whole of the Palestine Liberation Organization and conceivably the Iranians to boot.”
“So what else do we need?” asked Weary.
Richard opened his mouth, but it was Robin who answered: “Help! All the help we can get.”
It was thirty-six hours since Mississippi’s helicopter had dropped them back onto Katapult’s lazarette. Thirtysix hours filled with an urgent drive to reach the Gulf as soon as possible. After one long, fast day’s sailing, they had anchored briefly in the anchorage area north of Muscat off the Omani coast. They had left on the dawn breeze this morning and a fitful southerly, sucked north by tremendous heat beginning to build in the desert fastnesses of Iran, had pushed them slowly another hundred miles up the coast. It had been a hot, hard, frustrating sail. Now, as the heat died, the darkness gathered, and the faltering wind began to ebb away, they were coming onto longitude 57 degrees east from Greenwich, latitude 25 degrees north of the equator, some fifty miles out from Fujayrah in the Gulf of Oman. Here, too, they proposed to anchor, if their still functioning echo-sounder could find them a bank or shoal a little nearer the surface than the deep water they had sailed all day. Then they could rest up for the long run through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf tomorrow.
The sun was setting on their port beam, bleeding down out of a lower sky gilded with flying sand. Even this far out, the wind blowing from Oman and the Emirates carried enough fine grains to itch scalps, gum eyes, tickle noses, and crunch between teeth. The air should have smelled of salt overlain with hints of sage and tamarisk from the desert. Instead it smelled of oil. The air here, all the way from Rass al Hadd to Shatt al Arab, always seemed to smell of oil.
Another huge tanker pushed inexorably past, long and low in the water ten miles to starboard heading south, her upper works a blaze of rose and ruby. A fleet of dhows, gull-winged, passed farther north, heading for the bay of Khawr Fakkan on the coattails of the wind that had deserted Katapult already.