Then she was free, pausing, her full weight on the box, swinging her other leg down, looking back in through the window — but only for the briefest second. The cabin door exploded in, burned through. The wardrobe vanished. A cloud of flame roared hungrily along the ceiling. In her haste to avoid it, she leaped back and stumbled onto the deck. On one knee by the box, she saw that it had burst open when she dropped it. Inside there were four long guns, magazines, and ammunition boxes.
At once her hands were busy closing the box. Then she grabbed the handle again and began to lug it toward the ladder.
Behind her the whole sterncastle burst into flame, but luckily, most of the force of the explosion went up. A breeze from hell itself seemed to waft around her, then she was free of that, too, and racing forward.
“Robin! What on earth!”
Richard and Sam Hood came tearing out of the bridge and sprinted toward her. They were close-by and yelling, yet she could only just hear them. “What is that?” called Richard as he neared. His shoulder came by hers, his strong arms reaching back.
“Rifles,” she said. “Russian…”
“Kalashnikhovs?” Richard fitted his guess seamlessly into hers.
“Probably Czech,” chimed in Hood.
“With ammunition…”
“That’s cool. Let’s take them.”
“What on earth d’you think I’m trying to do!”
So the three of them ran the case of rifles over to the ladder. Hood went down first, then the other two lowered the long box to him.
Then, even as Richard and Robin stepped aboard, Weary gunned the engine. While Katapult thudded into a cross sea, slowly pulling clear, they stowed what they had found in the lazarette. Moments later, Hood was helping Weary to set the computer. The sail motors whined as the huge sails extended themselves fore and aft out of the gleaming blade of the mast, then the Australian spun the wheel, letting Katapult lean into the first strong gust of evening wind. She came alive at once and began to skim away. The four of them breathed a sigh of relief, looking back at last.
Sunset was turning the haze from silver to gold but the incessant spume spun up by the monsoon made the air still heavy. The lingering afternoon heat made the sea seethe and boil even now. They seemed to be sailing through a gargantuan alchemist’s limbeck where the base metal of the nameless ship was being magically transmuted into gold. And even as they looked back, the long mystical spell reached fruition and the black bulk of the freighter vanished into the white-gold heart of an earthbound sun, like a great bubble of tar exploding into flame.
Struck dumb by the unexpected ferocity of it, they could only gape at the blinding rift in nature where the freighter once had been. Incredibly fast, the power of the explosion overtook them: the light first, moving fastest, dazzling even tight-closed eyes; the sound next, a cataclysmic detonation, flat, almost solid, like an ax blade to the ears. Then a maelstrom of power as the force of the explosion, twisting through the air, tearing through the water, brought the first flying detritus, the first great wave to them.
Then, for an immeasurable space of time it was as though they were in the grip of a typhoon, pitched this way and that, battered by solid air, rocklike water, steel-sharp wreckage.
They could do nothing other than crouch on the floor of the cockpit, clinging to each other, with Richard protecting Robin, waiting for it — one way or another — to end.
Chapter Two
The roar of a Bell 126 throttling back to alight on a helipad at the Kharg airstrip drowned out what he was saying. John Higgins, captain of Prometheus II, flagship of the Heritage Mariner tanker fleet, turned away, driving his fist in rage onto the teak rail that stood along the front of the port bridge wing. The thunder of the jet helicopter’s engine was a boon: he had been shouting and this would cover it. He was losing his temper far too much of late. And captains who found themselves yelling at anyone in this heat — especially at their own first officers — would be lucky to stay the course, let alone be posted senior captain, effective admiral of the fleet, as John planned on being.
The helicopter, a blinding speck in the dazzling haze, settled away onto the great gray black monstrosity of the refinery-island, dragging its noise with it, sluggishly over the Gulf. John turned back to face the subject of his ire, Lieutenant Cecil Smyke, R.N. (ret.), first officer, Prometheus. Behind the captain’s immaculate shoulder, fifty feet down, the main deck of the tanker stretched away to the forecastle head. The green, pipe-covered expanse of it was crawling with G.P. seamen in white overalls and officers in white uniforms all working in concert. At a tank top halfway down the deck in the ineffective shade of a Sampson post clustered a group of figures with cylinders and backpacks. Around them, in pattern, stretching across and along the deck, more men looked earnestly into the black dots of open Butterworth plates, down into the empty tank.
John could sense the intensity of preparations for getting his ship under way. It filled the furnace air all around him. He knew where each crew member was and what he or she was doing. The activity seemed almost anarchic, but in fact it was not. One team was completing a thorough internal check of a troublesome empty tank — a matter of some urgency as Prometheus had mysteriously been moved to the head of the line of empty tankers waiting to take on a load of oil. She would begin loading tonight. The others — deck and engineering officers alike — were preparing to receive the oil aboard. Only those on watch were at tasks unrelated to the cargo’s reception.
Only those on watch and First Lieutenant Cecil Smyke. Cecil stood, pale as a ghost, copper ringlets tarnished with sweat, round brown eyes narrowed by more than the glare, aristocratic face lined by more than centuries of breeding. Of all the times to get hung over to the point of incapacity, he had chosen the very worst.
“I warned you,” began his captain once again, his anger just under control now, “I warned you last night, Number One. If you want to play your stupid, juvenile games aboard my ship, be sure, be certain, they do not interfere with your duty!”
Smyke wavered slightly, a tall, thin figure in a silk dressing-gown. He kept his thin lips pressed closely together, all too aware of what might happen if he allowed them to part for an instant.
“Now look at us,” stormed the captain. “We still haven’t finished checking that blasted tank. We’re expected to move to the head of the queue, preferably without bumping into any of those poor beggars who have been stewing here for the better part of a month, and begin to take on a full load of crude in twelve hours’ time. With all the attendant paperwork. We have as a matter of some urgency to get stocked up for a return journey to Europort — a journey that is likely to start in a couple of days’ time. With all the damn paperwork that goes with it. And I have a first officer who cannot even stand up straight!”
This was, perhaps, a bit unfair, thought the captain wryly: the idiot was making almost heroic efforts to stand up straight. John Higgins prowled around him exuding outrage.
“You should be going down number-four tank but you’re sick instead.” The list of difficulties this caused began to wash over Smyke altogether. He closed his eyes. He had never seen the easygoing Captain Higgins — a common little oik, thought Cecil, for all his seniority — so enraged. Never believed the captain could become so enraged. Whole new vistas opened up before him as he really took stock of John Higgins for the first time. Richard Mariner’s right hand, they said, blessed with some of the great man’s genius. Little John, they called him — and never mockingly; as though Richard Mariner were Robin Hood reborn. Smyke hadn’t really credited it. Until now.