Abruptly her mood swung and for the first time ever in the nine years of their friendship, she really did feel fat and dowdy in the presence of this vision of beauty. Fat and dowdy and pregnant. She caught the tail end of a strange man’s glance at the pair of them and knew he hadn’t even noticed her. Oh, why had C. J. brought his daughter now? Now of all times! Her head began to buzz with depression, fatigue, and sickness.
The automatic doors hissed open and closed behind them. The night air swirled chokingly around her. The shadows attained substance and crushed against her like burning bodies. The stench of the oil, the tar, the car exhaust washed into her throat nauseatingly. The noises fell away as she became giddy with the shock of the heat. She tottered apart from the other three, and not even Richard noticed her distress. Her head spun. Her whole body was suddenly awash with sweat. This is very bad, she thought. Her knees gave. She fell.
And one of the shadowy bodies became real. One of the distant sounds said her name. Her moment of weakness was saved by steely strength and she found herself looking upward like the heroine of a popular romantic novel into the lean, proud face of a familiar desert warrior.
“Salah,” she whispered, and fainted into his arms.
Chapter Ten
Angus had found them a tidy thirty-footer, one of those craft Richard insisted on calling a “dhow” and everyone else called a launch. This launch was named Alouette. She had been built in the boatyards of the Creek at Dubai untold years ago and the only thing certain about her history was that she had once been owned by someone who had given her a French name. Her body was strong and watertight; shipshape, under her peeling paint; neat and tidy, if elderly. She had a high bow, falling in an exaggerated, elegant curve from a near-vertical bowsprit to a fine, sharp cutwater. Her forecastle was only a step or two above her maindeck, but it sloped up steeply toward her head. Her stubby mainmast stood at the center of her deck, along which lay the long crosspiece bearing her dull red sail. They would have no need of this, for, belowdeck, behind the mast, her engine room boasted a gleaming, perfectly maintained Perkins 4-236 diesel engine, complete with Hurth box transmission. At Richard’s first command from the bridge-house above the sterncastle, it kicked into steady motion and, as Robin spun the mahogany wheel, Salah and Angus cast off and they were away.
They set forth at dawn the next morning, the stuffy, overpowering darkness hesitating into lifeless gray for a moment; the gas flares paling in their flat galaxy north across the water whither Alouette’s head was pointing. The sky became the palest blue arcing overhead, down to the shadow-line at its junction with the pallid water. The whole of the Gulf seemed to hold its breath with only the little launch throbbing purposefully through the stillness. Then the sun came up out of the sea, filling the water with fire. A tidal wave of light seemed to wash over them, its crest brushing the dome of heaven itself, and it was day: day as though the night had never been.
But the night had existed all right, and had been a busy one at that. They had not paused to greet Salah at the airport but instead rushed him and the still-fainting Robin to the coolness of the air-conditioned car. Once inside, she had revived rapidly as they sped south again, with Richard concentrating fiercely on the road ahead. As he tried vainly to come to terms with the local style of driving, so Robin began to describe the plans to the new arrivals.
It was more than five years since Salah Malik and C. J. Martyr had last seen each other and, bound though they were by the events on the first Prometheus, they had grown into virtual strangers. Chris automatically mistrusted anyone until he had earned her respect and affection. This process had taken Richard and Robin some years. The fact of Salah’s natural magnetism simply complicated matters for her. The American girl’s nightmarish youth had inverted all her priorities. The slightest attractiveness in a man brought out a legion of defenses in her. Which was why, Robin thought, it had taken her so long to accept Richard. She glanced affectionately at the back of her husband’s head and something about the way his hair curled made her tingle with desire.
Salah’s arm lay across the back of the front bench seat and his knees swung in toward the gear shift as he turned to look back. Martyr sat behind him, and the women behind Richard. His eyes met Robin’s first and he smiled his old smile.
“I never thought you’d come, Salah,” she said. “It’s so dangerous for you.”
“It’s no problem. After Beirut, even death will be a relief, I think. I suppose that’s why there are so many so willing to die.”
His tone was difficult to gauge. Was it world-weary? Cynical? Merely ironic? All of a sudden, Robin became aware of the gap that had opened between them during the last years during which they had drifted apart.
“I thought you were a peaceful man,” said Martyr abruptly.
“And so I am, Chief.” Salah slipped easily back into the old ways. Martyr had not been a chief engineer for ten years.
“Then what are you doing in Beirut?”
“Looking for peace.”
“Have you looked for my father?” Robin asked. She had meant to be subtle, to come at it indirectly, in the diplomatic, English way. But her burning sense of urgency abruptly outweighed all her background and social conditioning. She realized that all that had held her back from hysteria since the news of the kidnapping was the pointlessness of indulging it.
“I have looked,” he answered gently. “Sir William is not there.”
“What?” Richard glanced across. “Are you certain?” He had taken his eyes off the road for a second at the worst possible moment, just as they came down off the causeway onto the first great roundabout in Manama. A yellow Chevrolet taxi sped past on the wrong side and turned across their path, horn screaming. Richard swore and stamped on the brakes. Half a ton of German steel stopped dead in the road. They were thrown around like puppets inside, but Salah had a firm grip on the seat back and a hand on the dashboard too. “Go!” he snapped and Richard did to the accelerator what he had just done to the brake and they hurled into a transient hole. “Hit the horn,” suggested Salah mildly, “and you’ll fit right in.” Richard did, and the car, mercifully unscathed, blended perfectly into the shrieking mass of traffic. So that the gaze of the policeman Salah had been watching passed incuriously over them, apparently noting nothing unusual.
The Palestinian repeated his assertion quietly in Angus’s office ten minutes later. “Sir William is not in Beirut. I know where the other hostages are and I am doing all in my power to help them. But no one in Beirut has Sir William, or has any part in this that I can discover. I am afraid we may have to look farther east.”
“Iran,” whispered Robin.
“It is hard to tell at the moment. Things are so confused there.”
“So you are not sure?” Angus tugged at his beard, lost in thought.
“No, I am not. You have tried asking questions in the Soukh?”
“I have. Nothing.”
“The Creek, of course? The boatyards there have always been full of gossip.”
“The Creek — indeed the whole of Dubai — has nothing to say to me. And as for Kor Rass al Kaimah, the Mujara, Ash Sharq, Al Khalida, it is the same: all the markets, ports, and docks on this side of the Gulf are silent on the subject.”
“But damn it!” exploded Robin. “Someone must know something.”
“Agreed,” answered Salah mildly. “But who? And where?”
“What I know is this,” grated Richard. “We have precious little time to sit around and wait for news. Our first job is to get Prometheus back. If the two incidents are connected we will then have a counter to bargain with. If they aren’t, we will have freed both Crewfinders and Heritage Mariner from their present position and can get on and find him no matter what it costs.”