“Coffee, Doc,” said Hood, coming up into the cockpit beside him. And as he did so, that strange, unsettling atmosphere returned. Weary looked earnestly down at his friend. But Hood had eyes only for the girl.
So that was it! thought Doc: old Sam had fallen in love.
“Hey!” he said, good humor returning to his voice. “You’d better get onto our nice new Navy radio and tell Rass al Kaimah that we’re just about to come back out!”
They rounded the Quoins soon after midday, having come out faster than they went in, but here their progress slowed dramatically. They had been slicing across that unseasonal southerly, but now they had no choice but to run straight into the teeth of it. The afternoon was horrifically hot. The temperature in the desert of Iran immediately to the north of them spiraled past one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and the air there superheated and began to rise as quickly as the temperature, sucking more air up the narrow channel of the Gulf of Oman. So the south wind intensified, blowing into their faces with almost storm-force pressure, unremittingly, as though physically trying to keep them back.
It was a gloomy, dangerous wind bringing no relief from the heat, merely moving northward the parched intensities of the Ar-rab al Khali, that great sand sea to the south of Saudi. Such cooler air as might have been tempted north out of the Indian Ocean was turned aside by the cliffs of Oman and kept well away to the south. But before it crossed the furnace of the Al Khali, that south wind had once been over the Gulf of Aden, and so it brought with it just enough moisture to cause a high scud of cloud. The cloud danced mockingly around the unforgiving, shapeless blaze of the sun and then began to thicken as that indescribable afternoon wore on, causing Hood, and even the cheerful Weary, to become narrow-eyed and worried.
In the face of that foul wind, they had no choice but to zigzag across the gulf from east to west, clawing their way a little farther south with every tack. But this procedure, hardly one unknown to yachtsmen, was complicated immeasurably by the fact that they were crossing and recrossing the tanker lanes. “Steam gives way to sail” says the old adage of the sea, but in the unlikely event of any tanker captain feeling like obeying it, there were too many pressures forbidding him to do so. The great ships were too unwieldy to turn quickly or easily. The progression of them, a seaborne caravan, was so closely packed here that to attempt any variation of course or speed would be criminally dangerous. Even to try to stop was a process that would take five miles to complete, such was the power of the forces acting on those gigantic bodies. No: Weary never expected to be given an inch. From side to side of the Omani gulf they skipped, therefore, in the teeth of the wind, close hauled as the broiling blast of it intensified, slipping between those great black hulks like Argo between the Clashing Rocks.
The atmosphere aboard reflected the atmosphere in the air. Chris said nothing to her father about her conversation with Sam. Indeed, she was still unsure how best to interpret it. Martyr could see clearly the way Sam Hood looked at his daughter, however, and he did not like it. Sam himself felt almost adrift, powerless in the grip of forces he could not comprehend, let alone control. He was repulsed by what he had seen the girl do and yet he could not keep his eyes off her. In the stultifying heat of the afternoon, the three men were wearing as little as possible but Christine remained fully dressed, armored against Hood’s gaze, which seemed to her to be hotter than the wind.
At four they were off Rass al Kuh, a low, sandy point backed by depressing-looking mangroves and the helpless shrug of the Kuh i Mubarak rising three hundred feet behind. Jarshak Bay lay before them as the Iranian coast turned almost due east. “Helm alee,” called Weary and spun her onto the new tack. Sailing upwind like this, he preferred to keep the con himself. The configuration of the sails moved smoothly as the computer followed his orders. The foresail and main thundered onto new curves as the blade of the mast swung round on the joint at its foot, and everything clicked into place. Katapult leaned the opposite way. The coastline, dead ahead, wheeled majestically and began to fall away behind. At once they were back among the tankers and as they gathered speed down the new leg, so one of the monsters gathered itself out of the wind haze and began to ooze across their bows. Weary narrowed his eyes, judging the convergence of their courses, not wishing to let her head fall off even by as little as a point toward the north. Quite the reverse, in fact. So they clawed across and up the wind, pulling over fifteen knots, directly toward that black iron wall nearly a quarter of a mile long, low and formidable in the water ahead of them.
The tanker was fully laden and sat nearly twenty feet lower in the water than the empty Prometheus. Her decks were less than twenty feet above the sluggish water, therefore. Katapult’s damaged mast would be level with the rust-yellowed bridge-wings when they got close enough. Nor would they have to wait long before measuring the comparison. Weary, still in the midst of calculation, brought her head up one more degree to the south, putting more speed on her but bringing her course dangerously convergent with the tanker’s. The rest of them gathered automatically to windward. Katapult had no trapezes, indeed her whole design was calculated to minimize the need for acrobatics from the crew — but her weather outrigger showed alarming signs of lifting out of the water, so it was natural that they should try to lend support. Christine, indeed, every bit as intrepid a sailor as her friend Robin Heritage, jumped out onto the outrigger itself. There she stood, holding on to the singing shroud while her father surreptitiously strengthened his hold upon her lifeline. The steady pressure of the gale whipped her hair loose from its ponytail. It tugged at her shirt, ballooning it one minute, molding it to her torso the next. The calculated danger excited her, taking her mind off Hood for a moment.
The supertanker’s massive hull was moving south past their course incredibly slowly while at the same time closing with them dangerously fast. Chris watched it dreamily, her mind lazily echoing the calculations Weary had already made. Most of her consciousness, however, was simply overwhelmed by the sensation of speed derived from being up here, reading the strain of Katapult’s movement through the wide-spread soles of her feet and the vibrato of the shroud in her hand. In spite of the fact that Katapult was nowhere near full speed, the tension formed between herself and the conflicting forces around her gave Chris the most exhilarating sensation she had ever experienced.
The raucous bellowing of the men’s voices spoiled it. Her eyes sprang open to discover the rear of the tanker’s bridge-wing sweeping by. Weary had judged the line to a nicety, but at the cost of bringing them almost within touching distance of the tanker’s stern. And it seemed that all the crew were there, pressed up against the after-railings, leaning over, many with binoculars, looking at Christine’s erect, romantic, eminently feminine figure. Yelling incomprehensible but clearly pointed messages to her.
It was too much. The weight of her memory crashed back down upon her and she reacted, as she had trained herself to do, with anger. With a rage as powerful as the sensation they had just defiled. “Bastards!” she yelled up at them. She leaped easily inboard, her hands busy with her lifeline. As she tore it off, she found herself confronted by Hood, his hand half extended to steady her. “Don’t you touch me!” she spat, far beyond rational control. “Don’t you even look at me again.” The strength of the emotion on her face made that gentle man fall back, and she was gone, pushing past him, down the companionway.