“That’s right!” Martyr could sit still no longer. He was up and pacing, seven hours less exhausted than they, like a sober guest late at a boozy party. “So we go after Prometheus first. When and how?”
“Dawn Sunday. We need some time to prepare.”
“Right. What does your preparation entail?”
Richard explained the situation: They needed better intelligence. They needed more arms.
“Intelligence?” rapped Martyr.
“Team one. Robin, Angus, Salah, and me. Angus found us a dhow…”
“Launch.”
“…A launch, thank you, Angus. We will go up to Bushehr. We check on Prometheus’s position. See if we can get close enough to learn anything more.”
“And if she’s not there anymore?” asked Robin.
“Back here at once and pray for news of her.”
“Okay,” said Martyr. “That’s team one. Team two?”
“On Katapult. You, Chris, Hood, and Doc. You’ll pick Hood up with the supplies and go out to Katapult when we’re finished here. Your job is to run down to Fujayrah. When you get down there you’ll find an explo- sives dumping ground. It’s marked as deep water on the chart, but there’s a ridge. Here, let me show you…”
The run up to Bushehr was 190 miles. Alouette was capable of eight knots. She had a gently following wind and no currents of the tideless Gulf chose to run against her. They made the crossing in twenty hours, therefore, arriving at 02:00 next morning, four hours before dawn.
Since crossing into the Iranian and Iraqi exclusion zones, Richard and Robin had kept watch and the others had slept, ready to be roused at a moment’s notice in case of trouble. It was easy enough to find the place, even at 02:00 in the dark with rudimentary navigation aids, because Bushehr Airport remained active on their starboard and Kharg, on their distant port, was all abustle. The coast from Rass osh Shatt, round the bay to Bushehr itself, was flat and shelved shallowly into the sea. Nearly five miles out they hit the ten-meter mark on the sounder, chucked the anchor over, and went to bed. Things were likely to get busier after dawn, so some rest was needed now.
The brightness woke Richard an instant after sunrise and he opened his eyes to slits. He found himself lying on Alouette’s teak decking, curled round Robin. Beyond her still-sleeping form, he could see an apparently thin strip of water, then the desert, reaching from the tide line to seeming infinity away in the heart of Iran. There was no scrub or grass visible, no vegetation at all that he could see — simply an ocher slope of sand rising gently out of the water until it attained a low plain that stretched monotonously away. There were mountains in the far distance, he knew, the southern ranges of the Zagroz with Shiraz at their heart, but they were far out of sight. All that seemed real was that distant, featureless plain, dominating the land and dictating the nature of the sea. A morning wind stirred, bringing the brimstone stench of it to his nostrils, together with enough fine sand grains to start him sneezing. So he sat up, took the headdress he had been using as a pillow and wrapped it round his head and face like any Arab would. When he stood, no eye on earth could have distinguished him from a million men dressed alike in a long white shirtlike djellabah and a bright checked kaffiyah. It was only when he called out excitedly in English that the illusion was shattered.
“Robin! There she is! My God, how could we have been so close without knowing?”
Prometheus lay at anchor less than a mile away. They were dead astern so that the length of her was eaten by perspective, but there was no doubting her scale. Even here, the clifflike hugeness of her was so overpowering that Richard was surprised he had felt nothing of it during the night, or while he was looking away across the desert just now.
She was sitting high, the great fin of her rudder alone enough to dwarf Alouette—perhaps even Katapult herself. Behind it, idle but boasting massive power, stood the blades of her twin propellers, like the rudder rising out of the still water to reveal only part of their true scale. Then, above these, the hull itself, rearing up and back in a colossal overhang. And on it was written clearly in white across her stern: PROMETHEUS II LONDON.
Instinctively, not a little awed by her, they spoke in whispers — they would have taken care in any case after Richard’s first, surprised exclamation, for they did not want English accents to carry across the still water.
“Well, there she is, just where Admiral Stark said she would be,” said Richard, first to gather his thoughts.
“No sign of life aboard,” observed Salah.
“And she wasn’t showing lights last night or we’d have seen her,” added Robin, her voice heavy with disapproval.
“That’s dangerous,” said Angus, angrily.
“Bloody lethal. Lucky we weren’t a mile farther that way last night or we’d have sailed straight into her. Stupid sods.” Robin was not at her best in the morning. After having delivered herself of this opinion, she vanished toward the low sterncastle.
“But what to do next,” mused Richard. “What to do.”
“You’re the boss,” said Angus. “We do what you say.”
“That’s fine with me,” said Salah. “But I know what I’d do. I’d try to get aboard.”
“Yes,” said Richard. “That’s obviously our next objective now we’re here. But how to start…”
“What would we do if we were just a bunch of fishermen out from Bushehr?” asked Angus.
“Sail right up and say hi?” ventured Salah, voice wavering between doubt and excitement.
“Damned if I wouldn’t!” said Richard decisively.
“You mean just sail right up to them and see what happens?” Angus seemed less pleased with the simple plan.
“At least it has the merit of the direct approach,” observed Richard. “And it’ll save a lot of time.”
“We’re here to save lives, not time,” countered Angus. “Starting with our own lives.”
“True. So, we’ll have to think this through carefully, step by step. Now, could we actually have come from Bushehr?”
“In a smallish launch?” Angus said. “No reason why not. It’s why we settled on this type of craft after all.”
“But not,” struck in Salah suddenly, “in a launch with a French name. Not from Bushehr. The Iranians aren’t calling boats by any names the mullahs mightn’t like at the moment. And they aren’t writing them in that sort of lettering.”
Out of nowhere at that moment, the name of the burning ship on that lost radio message sprang into Richard’s memory. It was amorphous, slightly out of focus, a serpentine puzzle of lines. But he thought he might be able to put it on paper fairly accurately. Salah might know what it meant. But he thrust the thought away as soon as it occurred to him. They had more important matters at hand. “Right,” he said. “So we’re not from Bushehr, or anywhere else in Iran. Where are we from?”
“Not too close by,” decided Salah. “We didn’t see them last night, but they might have seen us. We were carrying lights, remember.”
“Okay,” agreed Angus. “Then where’s closest on the far side of the Gulf? Somewhere in Kuwait, I guess.”
“Mina al Ahmadi and Al Mish’ad are both a hundred and fifty miles away,” said Richard, his eyes closed, consulting the chart in his head. “Nothing closer of any size.”