Of all of them, Salah was the one they most needed now. Perhaps he even knew the men holding her father and her ship. The realization seemed to hit her like a blow in the stomach. Her thoughts grew murderous…
She jerked her mind back from that dangerous path and returned them to yesterday, to that moment when Angus had told them Martyr was moving.
Of course he was. They all would be. Richard didn’t even need to contact them. They would know. From all over the world they would come like the crew of a fishing village’s lifeboat when the alarm sounds, leaving their families, their work, their lives. All they had to know was where Richard and Robin were heading for and somehow they would be there. Except for the man they needed most.
Except for Salah.
Her thoughts now full circle, she shook her head and brought her mind right back to the present. Richard still stood at the helm, though with Katapult slicing steadily across the wind on automatic setting he was there only to take evasive action should Robin spot anything. The other two were below, going about some business of their own.
And now they were just coming under the shadow of Fate. The massive oil platform, Fa’at to the Arabs but Fate to Westerners, rose out of the choppy sea on four great rusted legs like some ancient iron monster. Like some latter-day Colossus of Rhodes, she thought, striving to straddle Hormuz as the original had straddled Rhodes Harbor. It was an anachronism, out of place; deserted, unused, mysterious. It looked as though it had been built for the North Sea with a high platform raised further by cliffs of deserted prefabs clustered around its central derricks. The other platforms that studded this sea were flimsy by comparison, relying on small waves and tideless waters. But Fate was different. Alien. Almost eerie.
Who had put it there, when or why, Robin had no idea. Why they had abandoned it and left it deserted to rot like the Marie Celeste or the Flying Dutchman at anchor, she had never been able to discover. Yet there it stood, four strong legs rising out of that shallow sea, each one a hundred feet in circumference. Fifty feet high to the first level, a hundred to the flat tops of its buildings. Perhaps an acre in area, packed with emptiness, ruin, and despair. She had never been up there and knew of no one who had, but the atmosphere of the thing reached this far with ease. It was avoided alike by the small craft running south of it, hugging the coast superstitiously, by Abu Dhabi and Dubai; and by the tankers running north pushing the deep-water lanes dangerously close to the Iranian naval stations on Jezireh ye Qushm, ten scant miles beyond.
A sharp double click jerked her mind back aboard. While she had been daydreaming about Fate, Weary and Hood’s mysterious industry had moved from the cabin to the afterdeck. They had opened the lazarette and brought out both the box she had rescued from the burning ship and the other one, marked with a big X, they had also pulled up on the end of Richard’s line from the explosives dumping ground last night. And, surrounded by plastic-wrapped thunderflash grenades, they were stripping and checking the Kalashnikhovs.
Chapter Eight
Richard lay at his ease on Katapult’s foredeck while the multihull lay safely at anchor. He was luxuriating in the illusory coolness of night while Weary worked below. Darkness was really little cooler than daylight here, but at least it allowed the freedom of partial nudity. Like Robin, he had spent each day since they had passed the Quoins and entered the Gulf wearing far too much clothing as protection from the sun. Now he lay on the cooling foredeck wearing only a pair of swimming trunks and perspiring freely. He remembered Noel Mostert’s description of darkness in this place, “Like sitting in the heat of a black sun.” Damn right, he thought. Sleep would have been out of the question, even had he not been waiting.
Katapult had arrived in Manama and anchored at sunset. Robin and Hood had gone straight ashore, leaving Weary and Richard anchored out here, far enough away from the harbor itself to be fairly sure that the Bahraini customs would not ask what they were carrying. Bahrain remained a favorite landfall of his but he was well aware that not even that island state’s courteous authorities were likely to overlook six fully loaded Kalashnikhovs, several thousand rounds of ammunition, and four dozen thunderflash grenades.
So Robin had gone ashore like any innocent tourist to take a shower and collect Angus El Kebir. Hood had gone to report officially about Katapult’s part in the explosion of that mysterious, nameless, burning ship and to turn over the radio and the copy of the Koran they had found aboard her. And to see what gossip could be collected in the port and in the Soukh. Not much, Richard guessed, and nothing at all that Angus would have missed.
So now he waited, watching the night around him and taking what he suspected would be his last welcome rest until this thing was over.
Katapult’s “eyes” looked north, and so did Richard’s across the width of the Gulf toward Bushehr on the coast of Iran. Toward his pirated Prometheus, if Admiral Stark was correct. It was full night — had been so since half an hour after sunset — but it was not really dark. Before him lay uncounted oil rigs, as numerous, almost, as seaborne stars; each rig with its bright gas flare belching sooty yellow flames, each fiery flower indistinguishable from its reflection in the glassy surface beneath. In series, giving a kind of depth to the night, the flat galaxy of them spread away before him, flickering and dancing one and all, though moved by what forces Heaven alone knew. Certainly not by wind.
Above them, some real stars lay strewn across the sky, pallid in comparison. These were brightest overhead but faded into the distance until they were lost in cloud. For over Bushehr — above Prometheus herself perhaps — there was a thunderstorm. He could see the electrical power of it: flashes of brightness so dazzling in their intensity as to make him wince, even at this distance. The occasional discrete blue-white bolt arcing downward, burning itself into his retinas for seconds afterward. It was stunningly impressive — and the more so for being silent. There were few night sounds around him in any case. No wind, not even enough to hum in Katapult’s rigging. No sound of humanity, for he was too far out to catch any bustle from the bright glow of Manama. There were no other boats near at hand. No rigs. Nothing. Apart from the slapping of wavelets on her hull, and an occasional unfathomable sea sound, Katapult lay at the heart of a total silence into which crept occasionally only the faintest echo of a hint of a whisper of distant thunder, so quiet it might almost be a dream.
Richard knew these desert storms of old. Spectacular pyrotechnics, mind-numbing cacophony if one was close by. And, strangely, no rain at all. Dry desert winds whirling damper cloud-bearing air to colossal heights, begetting the most stunning of tempests, and yet, no matter how heavily those clouds poured, every drop would have evaporated hundreds of feet from the parched ground. Just another little joke of the desert.
But the quiet and the solitude gave him time to think of more than climatology. The relative inaction of the last few days had weighed more heavily on him than even Robin suspected. Katapult had begun to seem like a trap; the failure of the radio was the last straw. He was far too sensible to blame himself for any of this — though Robin, he knew, her moods made strange by her pregnancy, was suffering pangs of survivor guilt. It was nothing more than coincidence that all this had happened while they were so far away from base, so completely out of touch. Or seemed to be nothing more at the moment. He regretted poignantly that he was not at the center of things in London. But then again, for all that he had been a passenger so far rather than a prime mover, he felt he was nearer the heart of things here where he was now. Certainly, if he had been in London, he would have been bound with red tape. Doing more, but achieving nothing. Never in his wildest dreams, if he had been at home when it all blew up, would he ever have considered what he was planning now. Buccaneering across the Gulf armed to the teeth with illicit Russian guns and thunderflash grenades.