“Deck here, Doctor, Cadet Perkins…”
“Captain here. All right, Mr. Perkins. I have the list.” He was relieved to be able to say it — it put him back in charge somehow. It was written on a plasticcoated notepad dangling from his oxygen tanks, both pad and tanks like those used by a deep-sea diver. It was very much like going diving, in fact, for the environment down here could be every bit as deadly as the most dangerous deeps of the ocean.
John did not pause on platform three, halfway down the staircase. Instead, prompted by Asha’s question, he scanned the list while he hurried deeper into the tank. Four familiar names registered in a flash. He had held the board so that he could see his watch at the same time and when he hit the transmit button by his left ear his voice was betraying increasing tension. “Captain here. Past platform three. Three minutes and counting. Doctor, about that list…”
A vagary of wind — the huge tank had its own microclimate — made the flesh stir on his naked forearms and abruptly he envied Asha the protection of her semitransparent cotton. No one could ever be quite sure what the air down here contained. It could be poisonous, corrosive, explosive — anything. Normally, under power, the empty tank would be full of inert gas from the ship’s engine pumped in here to smother the faintest possibility of a spark. And even that nonexplosive gas, protecting them from explosion, was nevertheless quite deadly. But there should be no inert gas in the tank now. Now they were at rest. Now the tank was full of air while the work on one of the automatic cleaners went ahead; of air and God knew what else. John had expected to be waiting for days before Prometheus’s tanks were filled. He had taken the chance to pump the gas out of this tank, fill it with air, and send down the team to fix a faulty washer in it.
Air was in many ways the most dangerous thing of all to allow down here, for it contained oxygen, and that could combine with the hydrocarbon gasses oozing from the ever-present oil sludge to create the most lethal cocktail imaginable. It hung invisibly all around them in the darkness. It could lie low, like ground fog at sunset. It could sail high, deadly clouds floating under the night-black sky of the tank’s roof. It could form bubbles, discrete, absolute, where the concentration went from 0 percent to 100 percent in a millimeter. He had seen gas readers jump from SAFE to DEADLY in a step. And once you were trapped in one of those bubbles, you would be lucky to break free; the stuff clung like gaseous glue. But no matter what circumstances you started breathing the gas under, you had only four minutes of life left unless a crash team brought you oxygen. Yet it was impossible to work down here for any length of time wearing heavy breathing equipment. The team he was racing toward would have had breathing equipment with them but they would have been breathing the air unprotected as they worked.
The malfunction of the automatic tank washing unit had shown up on Smyke’s computers during routine checking yesterday. Now it was important to get the unit fixed and clean the tank before loading a new cargo — hence the visit by more than a normal survey team: the first name on John’s crayon-written list was that of the irreplaceable American chief engineer, Bob Stark.
God! He hoped Bob was all right. They had sailed together regularly during the last five years, and their current lazy, friendly rivalry for the attentions of Asha Quartermaine hid a deep affection.
His feet skidded, thick rubber soles suddenly failing to find traction. He looked down, surprised to find himself standing on the tank floor, virtually up to his ankles in black ooze. “Captain here. On tank floor. Beware thick oil scum.”
He glanced at his watch again and Asha was at his side. Four minutes clicked up. Kerem joined them. That was it. One man remained on platform 3 looking for lights. Bob’s team should have been signaling since they radioed for help, to guide the crash team in. Ominously there had been no lights: that darkness over by the suspect unit made John fear for his chief engineer’s life.
He turned toward the first of the seven steel walls between them and their goal, only to bite back a shout of fright. Straightening into the beam of his torch came the figure of the man he feared dead. And, behind him, the rest of the team. Alive, unconcerned, all of them breathing the air.
John tore his headset off, gulping in the oil-tainted, nonlethal atmosphere. “Bob!” he stepped forward, hand thrust out, almost overcome with relief. Stark’s open, cheerful countenance folded into a look of concern as he took in Asha’s presence. He swept one hand back through the tousled gold shock of his hair, letting the farmboy cowlick fall to his narrow blue eyes in an unconscious gesture.
“What’s this?” he demanded. “Some kind of exercise?”
“Didn’t you broadcast an emergency?”
“Us? Nope. Clear and clean. Fixed the unit. No problem.”
“Then what…”
“Captain!” Distant voice from the headset in the helmet in his hand. “Deck here. Capt…”
They set off at a run, everything else forgotten but the urgent need to answer that panic call from above.
John didn’t even think to switch off his stopwatch. It had just clocked up eight minutes when he stepped up out of the tank top to stagger a little, stunned by the humid heat and brightness, across his silent deck. He sensed rather than saw Asha, Bob, and the others come up behind him, for all his attention was focused on what was going on in front of him.
Every officer, cadet, and crewman in his complement stood assembled here in shocked, silent lines, hands on heads, under the guns of a dozen figures dressed in camouflage fatigues and bright checked kaffiyah headdresses that hid their faces like masks.
Such are the vagaries of shock that John was overwhelmed at first, not by this act of terrorist piracy, but by the stunning cleanness of the air. And yet there was a familiar scent there too, terrifyingly out of place. He felt suddenly cold and stepped forward after the merest instant of hesitation. At once one of the guns was leveled at him and he saw a tiny trickle of smoke oozing from the muzzle. And he recognized the smell as cordite.
Then even as this jumble of sensation fell into place in his mind he noticed something else. There, at the terrorist’s feet was Cecil Smyke, sitting, apparently at his ease, against a vertical deck pipe. But even as John recognized that languid, silk-clad body, it rolled onto its side like a stuffed toy and slumped over until its sickstained chest was hidden from view. Only then could everyone see the gaping bullet wound where the back of his head used to be.
Chapter Three
Six hours later, three thousand miles west, a black Bentley Turbo Mulsane came off the M6 just south of Penrith, in the north of England, crossed the river and the railway, and began to climb Edenside toward Croglin and Cold Fell. It rode up the slate-dark Cumberland country like a thunderbolt heading for the opening of Macbeth. A gray summer’s day was drawing to its haunted, misty close and the precipitous, heathermottled hills were beginning to resemble slag heaps from the Black Country farther south.
Bill Heritage loved this landscape — Wordsworth country — more than any other, and, as chairman of the largest privately owned shipping company in Europe, he had traveled the world and knew them all. And he loved Cold Fell, the great, frowning fourteenth-century border reivers’ castle-cum-home that had come to him as a dowery with his wife nearly fifty years before when he had been young, ambitious, and poor, and she — Lady Fiona Graham — had been the most sought-after debutante of the last social season before the War. Their marriage had lasted thirty happy years before her abrupt and mercifully brief, fatal illness. It had been perfected in the birth of two beautiful daughters, both married in turn to Bill’s senior captain and business partner, Richard Mariner.