The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  He was safe in the shadow of her flaring bow until dawn—at first light, before her helmsman noticed a mast where there shouldn’t be a mast, he would sprint the few miles to the coast and find a hiding place until it was dark again. He expelled a deep breath. Already the sounds of the search craft were fading astern as the old tanker plodded away from the Persian Gulf.

  He was safe. His hands began to shake and his stomach churned in a delayed reaction to his fear. For the first time since he had entered the Gulf of Oman, he felt cold. Then a new thought began to gnaw at his mind. If LEVIATHAN was laid up at Capetown, why had Miles set the Iranians on him?

  24

  “We will load one million tons of Bul Hamine crude at Jazirat Hll.”

  Captain Ogilvy’s amplified voice echoed through the corridors, the dayrooms, the engine room, the mess, and the bridge, and on the deserted decks where the monsoon wind blew spray from the crashing wave tops.

  The crew responded with a relieved sigh. The new sea berth east of the island of Hll offered ample maneuvering room for LEVIATHAN to connect easily at the loading buoy. There was a price for safety, however. The sea berth was a remote outcropping of pipes and hoses on the crude-slicked surface of an empty sea; and Hll Island was fifty miles from Qatar. There was no canteen, nor even a place to exchange the ship’s movies.

  “We will discharge at either Bantry Bay or Le Havre,” Ogilvy concluded. “That will be all.”

  Damned shame not knowing whether it was Bantry or the French port. His men had a right to know where they were going; a precise destination was a better focal point on a long voyage than a question.

  He shut off the P.A. and stepped out on the bridge wing, anxious to watch the low coast of Ra’s al Hadd grow large on the horizon. The damp following wind stank of the ship’s smoke, and the rails dripped spray and condensation.

  The monsoon was running late this year. He thought how that must have wreaked havoc in India. What a way that lot lived, laying about doing not-all, just waiting for the rain.

  It would be hot in the Gulfs when they rounded the corner. He had less than an hour of bearable weather left on the bridge wing. Then for five days—two in, a day to load, and two out—he’d be trapped in the air conditioning, the doors and windows screwed tighter than a submarine.

  “Sir?”

  It was his second officer and he knew better than to bother him while he was taking the breeze.

  “Yes, Number Two,” he snapped irritably.

  “Radiophone, sir. Company channel.”

  “What the blazes to they want?”

  “I didn’t—”

  He continued to stare at Ra’s al Hadd. Let them stew. They’d already sent loading orders; now what did they want? Finally, he took a last deep breath of the salty wind and walked to the bridge house. The radio officer had routed the call to one of the telephones by his new chair. Ogilvy had taken to spending hours in it every day, to the consternation of his navigational officers who had to cope with the Old Man’s eye on them throughout their watches.

  It was James Bruce in London. They exchanged chilly pleasantries, their last confrontation still rankling. Then Bruce said, “He’s at it again.”

  “Who is at what again?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Hardin? ”

  “Yes.”

  “West Africa?” asked Ogilvy, irritated that Bruce would try to foist another helicopter on him when he rounded the Cape.

  “No,” said Bruce. “The Iranian Navy chased him at the Quoins.”

  “The Quoins? How in hell did he get there?”

  “The same way that he got to Capetown,” said Bruce. “He sailed.”

  Panic knotted Ogilvy’s stomach. “When was he in Capetown?”

  “About the time you arrived.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m not going into it on the air,” said Bruce. “But we have various sources. The same who alerted us the first time.”

  “Why didn’t he attack in Capetown?”

  “We don’t know. He might have been disabled.”

  “Are you telling me he came into Table Bay after the storm?”

  “Apparently he did.”

  Panic of another sort rippled through Ogilvy. He dispelled it quickly. The sea was arbitrary. Hardin was undoubtedly a very lucky man to have survived, but he had no special powers.

  “Where is he now? Is he hunting?”

  “Not now, he isn’t. He’s running.”

  Ogilvy laughed sarcastically. “One man in a sailing yacht gave the slip to the Iranian Navy?”

  “It was night. But they think they’re driving him your way.”

  Instantly, Ogilvy switched to the bridge telphone. “Number Two!”

  “Sir?” The reply came fast. The second was watching from the starboard wing.

  “Post men at the bow and masthead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The man on the sailing yacht.”

  “Yes, sir. . . . Do you suppose he will attack, sir?”

  “Not if your lookouts keep a weather eye,” Ogilvy snapped.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The charts of the remainder of his voyage passed through his mind like filmstrips. Narrow traffic schemes. Target areas. The Quoins was typical of Hardin.

  “Are you there?” asked Bruce on the radiophone.

  “Yes. What are you doing about him?”

  “The Iranians and the Saudis will provide sea and air cover until they capture him. You should be seeing the first of them any moment.”

  “Bloody marvelous,” Ogilvy replied heavily. “Two wog air forces chasing one bonkers yachtsman. I’ll be lucky if one of them doesn’t prang into my hull.”

  “This is an open channel,” Bruce said stiffly. “Please mind your tongue, Cedric.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No. Just don’t worry, Cedric. You’ll be safe as houses. I’ll contact you as soon as they capture him.”

  “If they capture him.”

  “They will. . . . One thing, Cedric. The Iranians might request that you heave to until they do.”

  “Not bloody likely,” snapped Ogilvy.

  “Now be reasonable,” Bruce said primly.

  “Hardin can’t set up a shot if he’s on the run.”

  “Try not to provoke them, Cedric.”

  “There’s a high coming in tomorrow. They’ll have him as soon as the sky clears. There’s no need to stop.” He cradled the phone.

  The radio officer approached his chair moments later.

  “Excuse me, sir. Shall we call in to Doha?”

  “Yes. Get your ETA from Number Two.”

  Ogilvy went out on the bridge wing again and stood watching Ra’s al Hadd. A flock of helicopters approached in formation and buzzed the ship with an infernal racket, which, Ogilvy assumed, was meant to be reassuring. They bore Saudi Arabian markings. He stared stonily ahead, ignoring the grinning fool who hovered beside the bridge tower and waved as if he’d just won the Battle of Britain.

  Hardin had certainly chosen a poor place to be hunted. Both the Saudis and the Iranians cast greedy eyes on the Persian Gulf and its approaches; they would blanket the area. Out here the Iranians wouldn’t challenge the Saudis, but farther in clouds of aircraft, from their base at Chh Bahr across the Gulf of Oman, would descend in a demonstration of their control of the strategic strait. A grim smile wrinkled Ogilvy’s lips. If they put their Navy into the search, there would be less of them to pester crude carriers with their pollution checks.

  His mouth tightened. What a horrifying lot to be hunting a man. Hardin had no idea what he was in for. Once when he had been in the Gulf, long ago, before the war, he and another foolhardy young officer had gone ashore in mufti at Al Jubayl; it was during Id al Fitr, the end of Ramadan, the fasting month. The Arabs had caught one of their number drinking some whiskey, which was forbidden by Moslem law, and Ogilvy had been an unwilling witness to a savage public flogging. Pinned near
the pillory by the bloodthirsty mob, he had seen and heard it all—the victim’s screams, the sighs in the crowd, the fierce odor of sadistic excitement, the blood—but the thing that stuck in his mind and marked him forever was the awful sound of the lash. It made a noise like ripping cloth as it tore through the man’s flesh.

  It had left Ogilvy with a hatred of the Arabs he had never lost. The Iranians noisily insisted they were not Arab, but if half one read in the newspapers was true, they were just as bad with their secret police and their torture chambers. Hardin was in for a bad time whichever side caught him. Damned fool.

  25

  Hardin raised his spare sextant to the pearly sky and measured the angle between the molten white sun and the pale horizon. He marked the time—a minute and forty seconds after noon—then crouched under the storm sail awning he had rigged over the cockpit and pored through the fine-print tables in the Nautical Almanac with eyes that burned from fatigue. He couldn’t work at the chart table because the temperature in the cabin was one hundred twenty-five degrees.

  Though the Swan was plowing west-southwest at six knots, its passing created no cooling breeze, merely a sluggish stirring of the thick, gritty air. Fine dust hung everywhere, layering the decks and coating Hardin’s skin, the inside of his mouth, and his burning eyes.

  He took a swig of warm water from the Thermos, swirled it around his mouth, and swallowed. Then he finished his calculations and confirmed what his watch and the Swan’s speedometer had already told him. Having motored at top speed for the thirteen hours since he had reversed course and abandoned the safety of the old tanker, he had penetrated eighty miles into the Persian Gulf.

  The euphoria he had felt after his escape, his impulsive doubling back, and his undetected thrust through the Strait had evaporated in the white heat of morning. His head ached from the heat and the constant grinding of the diesel engine. His back hurt from sitting so long, pains lanced his shoulders, and with the exhaustion that weighted his body came the doubts.

  He was low on fuel again, almost out of food, the loran was shot—a victim of the oppressive humidity—and he was in desperate need of sleep. The Swan was leaking badly. But even if he could find a way to rest and even if the Swan could be repaired, he had no hope of escape. The six-hundred-mile-long boot-shaped Gulf was surrounded by land. The narrow Strait of Hormuz, the only way in, was the only way out.

  This was not the challenge he had taken. When he had first known that he had to sink LEVIATHAN, he had accepted the likelihood that he would lose his existence as Peter Hardin, but with the oceans of the world before his boat, he hadn’t doubted that he would find some sort of life somewhere. Even when he had learned about the helicopter and had raced to the southern seas, he had held no illusions—within the limits of his experience and imagination—about the endurance that the long, brutal voyage would demand. But then, too, his fate had been in his own hands. He would endure. Similarly, the ambush at the Quoins had offered a good chance to escape in the confusion.

  But now there would be no escape, only death. And the bitch of it was he didn’t want to die, had never intended to die, and every fiber of his being was crying out against death, crying to put the boat about again and sneak back out the Strait when night fell.

  He sat a long time, nodding over the wheel, blinking at the compass, ransacking his predicament for a decent withdrawal. He was lightheaded from fatigue; he had no charts because he had never considered pursuing LEVIATHAN into the Gulf; and his single ally had betrayed him to the Iranian Navy. If he turned around now, he would be miles out in the Gulf of Oman before dawn.

  And yet: The Sailing Directions that covered the Gulf of Oman included the Persian Gulf, and while they were intended only to supplement charts, they still listed courses, dangers, and the positions of ports and islands including Hll. Miles couldn’t hurt him any more than he had already, and no one, including the Iranian Navy, knew that he was deep inside the Persian Gulf.

  Pressing on, Carolyn would joke through clenched teeth on difficult days. He scooped a bucket of warm Gulf water and poured it over his head. Then he drank fresh water, swallowed a handful of vitamins and food supplements, and pumped the bilges for ten minutes.

  He turned the radio on full volume and tuned it to the frequency listed in the Admiralty Guide for the coastal radio station operated by Shell at Doha; the Sailing Directions instructed vessels bound for Hll to report their estimated times of arrival and the amount of cargo they required.

  The dust united with the humid haze and the low clouds to form a dense canopy that hung over the Swan like hot cotton. He could often see as far as a mile when the wind roused the haze, but the ceiling stayed low, pierced only by the white sun, and though he sometimes heard the buzz-thump-thump of helicopters, he saw none. The radio blared a medley of accented English as ships from all the world rounded Ra’s al Hadd.

  He went below to check the bilges. The heat was appalling; his temples began to throb as if a thick, knotted rope were twisting around his head. He noticed that the barometer was rising rapidly. If a dry, northern shamal was coming in, it might disperse his cloud-and-dust cover before nightfall. He couldn’t worry about it. He was a few miles south of the tanker routes, and at present that was all he could do to stay out of sight. When he got nearer to Hll, he would look for a place to hide until it was time to kill LEVIATHAN.

  The heat pounded on the boat like sand dropped from a steam shovel, and Hardin drowsed despite the rattle of the engine and the intermittent ear-piercing crackles from the radio. Suddenly, he awakened to a new sound. An English voice, muddied by weak reception, was trying to raise the Qatar coastal station.

  “H-O-Y . . . H-O-Y . . . H-O-Y. This is Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo . . . Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo. . . . Hotel-Oscar-Yankee . . . Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. This is Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo to Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Do you receive me, please?”

  Hardin flung himself down the companionway. Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo, SQFB, was LEVIATHAN’s call sign.

  “Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. This is Sierra-Quebec-Foxtrot-Bravo calling Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Do you receive me, please?”

  He had switched to the earphones and was fine tuning the receiver before he realized that the cabin floor was wet.

  Water gleamed in the grooves between the floorboards, and here and there puddles crinkled from the engine’s vibrations.

  LEVIATHAN turned the corner of Ra’s al Hadd and the sea changed with an abruptness that startled Ogilvy as much now as it had the first time more than forty years ago. The water flattened like gelatin. The heat rose twenty degrees; and the wind died. Soon steep cliffs marked the coast they would follow, and ahead the hazy Gulf of Oman glared like an oven seen through smoked glass.

  Ogilvy fixed his binoculars on the speck of white that was the lookout on LEVIATHAN’s bow—an English sailor wearing a hat for protection from the hot sun. He picked up the bridge wing phone and spoke to the bosun. Moments later a sailor pedaled a bicycle forward on the shimmering deck. He relieved the lookout, who returned to the bridge tower.

  The new man was Pakistani, because Ogilvy believed that eastern men were less affected by the heat than westerners. At his feet was a Thermos jug of iced tea, issued by Ogilvy’s orders, to preserve him in the baking heat so he would stay alert. Overhead a new lookout, also carrying a Thermos, was climbing the mast between the twin funnels. Both men would be relieved in an hour.

  Visibility was several miles, and every few minutes a helicopter could be seen hanging on the horizon like a Christmas-tree ornament. But the only sails on the sea were lateens, ageless shapes as common to the Gulf of Oman as the rocky promontories on its coast. Could Hardin dart out of one of those rocky coves? It wasn’t likely. LEVIATHAN was seven miles offshore and helicopters had her in constant sight.

  Ogilvy returned to the comfort of the air conditioning, retired to his cabin, and ordered lunch. He ate slowly, pausing between courses to lean back in his comfortable desk chair, wonder
ing about Hardin and his obsession. The man was a renegade, a traitor to his healing profession, an outcast by choice. There were people like that. Radicals, criminals, fanatics. All outsiders, all having in common a perverse hunger to linger beyond the circle of human warmth.

  He smiled. The dining steward thought that he was happy with the iced melon, but Ogilvy was teasing himself with a strange insight. In a rare moment of introspection he had included seamen—and their captains—in the lonely clan of voluntary exiles.

  Concluding his lunch and his thoughts simultaneously, the captain climbed into bed for his last rest in many hours. The exacting business of navigating the crowded Gulf and loading the oil was about to begin. He would have little relief until he was conning LEVIATHAN past these shores in the opposite direction, deeply laden and homeward bound.

  He picked up his bedside telephone and called the bridge for a report on the search and the air cover. Nothing; the Arabian helicopters were still sweeping the water ahead of LEVIATHAN. He cradled the telephone reflectively. Was it possible they were making a big mistake?

  He lay awake in his darkened cabin pondering and playing the charts through his mind again. He felt he knew Hardin. He had seen the way the man had waited at the pub, listening, watching, then attacking. He liked setting traps. And to have survived the storm that had disabled LEVIATHAN and kept going showed he was a man of extraordinary determination, lunatic as he might be.

  Ogilvy dialed the telephone.

  “Radio Room, Second Officer—”

  “Get me Captain Bruce in London.” He dressed in the ten minutes it took to place the call. Bruce came on with assurances. The Iranians promised to have Hardin very soon. Ogilvy cut him off.

  “A fiver says he doubled back.”

  Hardin stared at the wrinkled puddles. How long had he slept? Why hadn’t he noticed the sluggish feel that the extra weight gave the Swan?

  LEVIATHAN’s radio operator was still hailing Doha. “Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. Hotel-Oscar-Yankee. This is Sierra—”