by Peter Tonkin
'Third Mate here. Sir?'
'Captain here. Receiving you loud and clear.’
'Just going out on to the port ...'Slope probably said more, but he cut himself off by switching to Receive too soon.
'Report when you reach the Sampson posts. Over. Can you see him, Ben? The port bridge wing's in my way ...’
'No, sir.'
'No? Strange. Must be thicker than I ...'
'It's not that, sir. I can see the deck. He's not there.’
'Third Mate. This is the Captain. Do you receive me?'
The R/T hissed. Nothing more. Like sand grains brushing over silk. A sinister sound. Something's wrong, thought Richard.
'Slope?'
No reply. Nothing.
He was on his feet without further thought. His voice remained calm, but he let a little urgency into it. 'She's yours, Ben. I'm going to look for the Third Mate.’ There was another R/T on the chart table. He gestured to it. 'John. You monitor me.'
'Aye, sir. But take care. She's a tricky ship.'
Richard gave a bark of laughter. then realised the Manxman was quite serious.
Crossing to the lift, he left the R/T on, but only the hiss came in, ghostly enough to make him think about John's instinctive superstition.
The lift whispered down until the doors opened on A deck. Richard hurried across and stepped out on to the port side without pausing to think. Immediately, his face filled with sand. He had forgotten about this. Now that Prometheus was at slow ahead, the wind was effectively gusting 10-15 knots; and freshening, by the feel of it. He slitted his streaming eyes and bundled his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, sneezing convulsively. The sand moved down his collar with a disturbing sense of personal invasion. Into his ears and up his nose. He sneezed again.
When his eyes cleared, he saw the monstrous tracks leading straight to the broken rail and understood at once the story they told of the Third Mate. Badly disorientated by the sand, he had stumbled forward into the rail which, like the Sat Nav, had not been all that it seemed. Silently cursing the lackadaisical workmanship which had simply added another coat of varnish without checking the wood beneath, he shambled forward. There could be no mistake.
'Man overboard! Stop Engines! Man overboard!'
A second later, the whooping of the foghorn became the howl of the emergency siren. The throb of the engines stopped.
Richard was still by the broken rail, peering down into the red murk. Because of the sand he saw little. Because of the siren he heard nothing. Not the opening of the door behind him. Not the sand-muffled footsteps. Why he turned he would never know.
He saw Martyr's face locked in a strange rictus: rage horror - surprise. He could not tell. The man might simply have been going to sneeze, his face, like Richard's a minute before, unexpectedly full of sand.
Then their shoulders collided and Richard stepped back. Automatically, he caught the broken end of the rail. A substantial section of it filled his grasp, but then it simply crumbled as his full weight came upon it. Broke away and went to dust in his fist. One more step was enough and he was falling.
His mind spun as wildly as his body for a second. Images whirled like his arms and legs while the R/T sailed uselessly away. It occurred to him that Martyr might well have pushed Slope overboard in retaliation for this morning's prank. Or he might be trying to take revenge on Richard himself for the humiliation of last night's defeat in the officers' lounge. He did not yet know the man well enough to make any sensible guess. Or of course John might be right. Maybe Prometheus was trying to get rid of her second crew that week.
He jerked in a desperate lungful of air. Then the water exploded around him and he was thinking with agonising clarity.
He landed upright, facing in, ten feet from the tanker's side. He plunged deep beneath the swirling surface, and was immediately sucked towards the huge metal wall. The black hull plunged down and down before him, curving away towards the keel. And that keel seemed to call to him, pulling him deeper and deeper still.
At the final end of his massive endurance, just as his lungs began to empty of their own accord, he felt the downward motion slow. He crossed his arms before his face and smashed into the unforgiving steel as he started up.
He burst back into the air a few feet from the hull again, still facing in. Immediately, even as he fought for the first, life-giving breath, he was half thrown, half sucked towards Prometheus as a wave worked with the ship's movement.
He brought his feet up just in time, pushing his sodden desert boots against the slippery metal and kicking away. His feet were snatched to the left. He wrenched shoulders and upper arms, paddling wildly to keep his feet between himself and his ship, choking in great ragged breaths as he did so. Much less than a quarter of the hull to go, he thought. And as the engine stopped, so the great propeller stilled. If he kept agile and lucky, he might get past the end of the ship alive.
Then there would only be the Gulf to contend with.
He could imagine Ben on the bridge, swearing like a trooper, bringing Prometheus round in a Williamson turn. The thought made him smile.
He slid down another hugely buoyant, incredibly salty wave and kicked back, legs and belly smarting with the strain, water rushing in over his head and shoulders, exploding against the steel, foaming back to bury him.
Damn! The stuff even tasted of oil!
Abruptly, the most unexpected thing happened. The white bow of a lifeboat grazed down his left side and collided with Prometheus. There was a sound like the biggest gong in the world. Richard watched, overcome by it all.
Then arms reached down from the point and unceremoniously dragged him aboard, past a wildly whipping vertical length of rope. Miraculously, Martyr had managed to put the small port-side lifeboat down less than an arm's length from him. Within seconds he had recovered himself and was kneeling beside the Chief in the pitching little cockleshell. They leaned against each other gasping until another wave drove in, threatening to turn the boat to matchwood. Then their fingers were feverishly at work, trying to release the rope falls bow and stem before the sea ground the boat to splinters against the ship like a kernel of corn in a mill.
The next wave tumbled into them, catching them still in the trough. Swamping them. Smashing them against Prometheus again. Something in the filthy foam wrapped itself lazily around Richard's thigh. He kicked it free at once, thinking of the Gulf's deadly sea snakes. It was only weed.
As soon as the fall whipped free of his hand, Richard pushed back past Martyr and swung the handle to start the engine. It caught at once. He opened the throttle and turned her head into the teeth of the next wave. It hurled them back to slam against the tanker once more, then rose beneath them, launching them down its back as though down a slipway. Water exploded up in great arcs on either side of the bow, and they were whirled away into the storm.
Even though the wind had strengthened, its action with the waves cleared the air down here. Richard could see further now than he had been able to from the bridge. But it was Martyr, crouching in the bow like some misshapen figurehead, who saw Slope first, on the crest of a wave some fifty yards ahead. He turned, yelled, gestured. When he turned back, the Third Mate was gone again. Richard didn't see him at all.
Inevitably, however, the random march of the waves threw up another winning combination so that the boat rose on the crest of a wave at the same time that Slope did, twenty yards away. He was either waving feebly, or the sea was playing tricks with them. But he wasn't wearing a life jacket, Richard reckoned grimly; so if he wasn't alive, he wouldn't still be afloat.
Waves rose up between them, their crests streaming forward in a continuous spray of filthy spindrift plucked off by the wind. The lifeboat began to seesaw sickeningly. Martyr yelled something unintelligible and raised his right arm. Richard brought the boat's head starboard. The arm dropped. They straightened. The waves came in on the port quarter, slamming her round like pile drivers.
They tilted to starboard,
crawled crabwise up the concave face of a six-footer about to break, and there was Slope, three feet from the stem, swirled past them in a flash and into their lee.
Richard had the helm hard over at once. Martyr threw himself sideways, nearly capsizing them. He caught at Slope. Missed. Caught again.
Slope seemed to be floating in soiled syrup. His arms were waving madly. The dead white oval of his face projected terror. As Martyr reached the third time, Richard quickly scanned the golden maelstrom for sharks. There were none that he could see.
Martyr was on his knees, legs spread, straining forward over the starboard bow. This time their hands met. Closed.
Held.
As the wave broke.
The boat's head slammed right round. Martyr went sideways so hard he nearly fell overboard. The whole length of Slope's body crashed against the gunwale. Richard let go of the tiller, diving forward. One hand went to Martyr's right ankle, steadying him. The other plunged over the side, deep into the sea, trying to grab Slope's legs.
Something brushed its wrist.
Automatically, he jerked it back out of the water. Then he had let go of Martyr and was reaching for Slope with desperate urgency, understanding the young man's fear. He was too late.
He only saw it for a moment as it neared the surface, struck and fell away again into the sand-clotted depths. That one glimpse was enough. It was perhaps four feet long, broad as a man's forearm, and bright unbroken yellow like a buttercup. It moved with the sinuous grace of an eel, but it had the scaly skin and flat, diamond head which could mean only one thing.
Precisely what sort of snake it was, Richard did not know. It had a tiny mouth - all Gulf snakes do - and a long black double tongue. The fangs which it sank into the tip of Slope's bare toe, they were surprisingly long, too.
The boy's body went rigid. The snake fell away, writhing lazily. Richard, his arms in the foaming water to the elbow, grabbed an ankle. 'Now!' he yelled, at the top of his voice, and heaved. Slope came in easily, like a length of wood.
Martyr had seen the snake as clearly as Richard had. No sooner was Slope's body onboard than he ripped the linen belt off his overalls and made a tourniquet, as best he could, halfway up the foot. The flesh grew taut as he pulled it tight, two tiny blue pinpricks leaking blood at the tip of the smallest toe.
'Wild West stuff,' cried Martyr flourishing a knife. He cut once, hard. Something small and white fell overboard: the top joint of the bitten toe. It was a desperate act - but Slope was in deadly danger from the venom.
The next wave nearly swamped them. Only the weight of the water already in the bilges stopped them tipping over; but far too much more came in over the gunwales. Richard leaped back for the tiller, opened the throttle and swung her round until wind and weather were at his back.
Just in time. The greatest wave so far lifted them. Crested. Broke. Tarnished silver foam boiled over the side and vomited into their laps. They surfed forward as though hitched to Leviathan through water like the surface of an erupting volcano.
It was like boating at the birth of the world.
Abruptly, the dancing clouds in front of them exploded as though a flare a hundred yards wide had been ignited there. It was Prometheus, with all her lights ablaze.
Five minutes after that, they were aboard. Slope's inert body was being rushed up to the sickbay. Martyr and Mariner were following side by side in silence, bone-weary, slow, old with fatigue.
***
The whole rescue, which seemed to have taken a lifetime, had actually filled only twenty minutes.
In the sickbay, Slope was lying face up on the bed. Ben was sticking a plaster over the stump of his toe. The Third Mate was unconscious, breathing with rapid, shallow gasps through a slack mouth. 'How is he?' asked Richard.
Ben looked up, a troubled expression sitting ill on his usually open, cheerful face. 'Not good. We'll have to get him to hospital in short order. Nice piece of surgery, Chief. Crude, but nice.'
They were hove-to fifty miles north of Dubai. That was their best bet. There was a fast launch service out from Ras al Kaimah which was regularly used to ferry crews to and from supertankers. But even the fastest launch service was likely to be too slow for Slope.
'Radio for a helicopter,' suggested Martyr, who was destroying a perfectly good towel simply by rubbing his hair with it.
'Couldn't get out here in this,' countered Richard.
'Neither could the launch,' concluded the Chief, looking disgustedly at the oil-smeared wreck of the towel.
In the end, Richard radioed Dubai who said they would have a helicopter and a launch standing by, each with a medical team. Whichever could go first would. Then he set Tsirtos to trying to locate Demetrios.
They went back to slow ahead, making five knots, and altered course slightly, moving slowly south-east, south of Jazireh Ye Sirri, down towards Dubai.
At last Richard went to his own cabin, pulling off his soiled shirt as he went and bunching it up in his left fist. Halfway down the C deck corridor, he paused. One more thing, he thought. He crossed to Martyr's door and knocked.
Abruptly, Martyr was standing in front of him, also naked to the waist; one white towel wrapped around his loins, another draped over his shoulders. The hair on his chest bunched sand-grey and curled down his corrugated belly. Just above the towel line he had three navels.
'I wanted to thank you for pulling me out.' Richard stuck out his hand.
Martyr gripped it briefly, then, 'Forget it,' he said. 'I pushed you in first. I was blinded by the sand. Stupid accident. Sorry, Captain.' And he closed the door.
Richard hesitated, then turned away, surprised to find he believed the man.
By 17.35, Richard was back in the radio room, leaning against the door jamb, his bright blue eyes wandering vaguely over the clutter of untidy wiring, green metal, plastic fascia and flashing lights which made up Tsirtos's den. He had already been to the sickbay, again, and to the bridge.
'No sign of the Owner?'
'No, sir. I've checked all the numbers he gave me, but no one can reach him.'
'And the other number? His agent in Dubai?'
'No reply. I think they must have gone home for the day. Shut up shop.'
Richard's mouth thinned. This was unsatisfactory, to put it mildly. They were an officer short on an almost skeletal crew. It was usual enough for an independent to sail with only three officers for deck watch, but Richard was used to the Heritage way - four deck officers apart from the Captain, plus at least two more partially qualified trainees: Prometheus, though perfectly legal, felt undermanned to him. Both the Owner and his nearest recommended agent were unobtainable. He ought to wait until he could contact one or the other. But Demetrios had specifically, if unusually, ordered a fast voyage, and Richard wasn't prepared to go charging round the Cape with only two deck officers to keep bridge watch.
He was in a position from which he, as head of Crewfinders, had rescued many a Master during the last few years. Rescuing himself would be no problem at all. He wouldn't even have to disturb the girls in that distant office - that far distant office - in St Mary Axe.
'OK,' he said, unconsciously sealing his fate. 'Get me Angus El Kebir. Here's the number of his Dubai office.'
Demetrios's agents might knock off early. Crewfinders' did not.
Then he returned to the bridge, haunted by the sight of the Chief's unusual stomach. Knowing that the second and third dimples were not extra navels at all, of course.
They were bullet wounds.
Chapter Eight
Angus El Kebir was not used to being intimidated. There flowed in his veins the blood of desert princes and of Highland chieftains. At the court of his father's distant cousin the Sheik, he wore - as was his right - the tartans of his mother's ancestors.
Offspring of an Arab prince and a Scottish governess, both now deceased, he had been educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh where he had learned to admire industriousness and look down his long hooked nose at sl
oth; so, when the time had come for him to fulfil some kind of function in the world, he had scorned the thought of sponging off the Sheik, and hitched instead his rising star to that of Crewfinders and that of his old school friend, Richard Mariner.
Yet now he found himself sitting in his Dubai office, trying his best to hold the cold grey gaze opposite, stroking the fullness of his bright red beard, and thinking like a fox at bay.
'There is the Shamaal,' he temporised at last. 'You cannot even reach her in the Shamaal.'
'Oh, come on!' The accent was even more clipped than his own; impatient where his was conciliatory. 'You're stalling. You know I have every right to be aboard. I have come to you simply because I cannot contact the Owner or his agent. If you won't get me out, I'll charter a helicopter and fly on out myself.'
Could this most unwelcome visitor also fly helicopters? Angus would not be at all surprised. There seemed little the offspring of Sir William Heritage would not do, if driven.
'I did not say "would not",' he placated; 'I said "could not". Prometheus will in all probability be through the Strait before the Shamaal clears. To take a helicopter down into the Arabian Sea would be expensive, even for you. Besides, you must know this is none of my business. Richard is there simply as this man Kostas Demetrios's Master. It has nothing to do with Crewfinders or with me.'
Robin Heritage jumped up out of the chair, too full of frustration to remain seated. A long hand swept a deceptively boyish lick of golden hair back out of those cold grey eyes. Angus shifted uncomfortably under the searching stare which seemed to see into his soul like the gaze of a djinn in a fairy tale - and which saw how completely he was prevaricating.
It was just this glare, so he had heard, which had made the young Heritage something of a power in the City. The old man, so they said, had yet to recover from the shock of the collision; but this youngster was pulling it all back together for him.
