At once she became entangled in the fight. A fist slammed into her ribs. A knee dug into the pit of her stomach. She disregarded the pain and lashed back, pausing only to make sure that she wasn’t hitting Martyr by mistake. Then after a few wild but utterly satisfying punches, she concentrated on the safer and much more sensible stratagem of trying to capture and hold Ben Strong’s right arm.
Ben twisted more viciously, butting the American in the face, pressing the point of his right elbow into the woman’s chest and digging it home with all his strength.
He couldn’t last much longer. He could feel his energy slipping away. He would have to break free and destroy them both. There was a gun in his life raft nearby. He slammed his head up into Martyr’s face again and bore down with his elbow with rib-cracking force.
And managed to break away.
It was that indefinable feeling of unease, so vague but so overpowering, that called Richard off the bridge at last.
He did not go willingly, too well aware that if the grounds for his almost subconscious suspicions were of any real consequence, then his place was here; but for once John Higgins let him down. John could feel nothing wrong at all, beyond the night and the storm.
“There’s more to it than that…” growled Richard.
“Only the absence of Robin and Ben.”
“They’ll be here soon. Sidetracked, probably…” In all honesty, Richard was so deeply wrapped up in his internal search for what was wrong that he hadn’t noticed the time pass. He was completely unaware just how long it had been since Robin left the bridge.
He prowled up to the helmsman’s shoulder, peering out vainly into the whirling, screaming murk. Able occasionally to see the glimmer of a navigation light; once in a while the distant ghost of a Sampson post. And, as he looked down the invisible deck, the feeling in him grew.
Until he could stand it no longer. “Quine, get onto the R/T, if you please. Warn a team of GP seamen to wait for me at the port exit from A deck. Get one seaman up here to take over a watch. John, you have her.”
He stepped out onto the port bridge wing. The wind hit him like a sledgehammer, sending him staggering back before he angled his solid body and fought his way across the pressure as though he were crossing a river in flood. At the far end of the bridge wing was Salah Malik, night glasses round his neck, solidly on watch. He jumped when Richard crashed into him.
Richard thrust his lips against a cold, wet ear. “There’s something wrong,” he yelled, gesturing at the deck. “We’ve got to go and check.”
The big Palestinian nodded vigorously. In spite of everything else going on around him out here, he had felt it too, that formless chill of unease.
At the A deck door, a group of half a dozen waited. Tersely, Richard explained that there was nothing he could put his finger on, but they had to check the ship from stem to stern. He split them into teams. They checked their R/Ts. They went out into the night.
Out here, the storm was a little more restrained than it had been on the bridge wing. Here there were all the protuberances of the deck; from tank tops to pipes, catwalk-capped, to break the power of the wind. But on the bridge wing there had been safe rails, each upright closed with a steel plate. Here there was nothing small to hold on to; nothing safe. They felt exposed, as though they were on a mountainside, and they gathered together, like animals afraid.
Slowly, painstakingly, they began to work their way down the deck. Every now and then, when they reached some kind of shelter, Richard and Salah would crouch side by side, one checking with the teams, the other with the bridge. Richard was becoming seriously disturbed by the nonarrival of Ben and Robin. And, while it did occur to him that they, too, might be exploring the ship, subject to the same formless fears as he was himself, never once did he imagine them locked in a life-or-death struggle less than one hundred yards away.
But the moment he stepped past the Sampson posts halfway down the deck, all thought of Ben and even Robin was driven from his mind.
Like everyone else who had crossed this line to night, he did so in the heart of a vicious squall; blind, deaf, dumb: distanced by a quirk of the storm from what was happening on the deck. And yet he knew at once. Even through the thick-soled yellow Wellingtons, lashed securely to his strong calves, the soles of his feet felt it instantly. The vibration of the deck was different. Up to the Sampson posts, the green steel throbbed to the rhythm of the mighty engine. Here it did not. Scant feet back, the deck was alive. Here it was dead.
Ice-cold inside as well as out, he whirled, falling to his knees. Salah came up beside him, reaching down to help, thinking only that the wind had toppled him. But Richard shrugged off the helping hand. He was peering at the green, fat-welded seam that stretched across the deck here. And as he looked, its thin lips ground together.
Was the movement in his imagination? It had been slight enough! He tore off his heavy gloves, pushing his fingers into the glassy streams of water, feeling for the truth before his hands went numb. Salah crashed to the deck beside him — and his hands were also there, long, dark-skinned fingers lost under the mill race of the water on the deck.
And then, proof positive! Simple and undeniable. The deck opened just wide enough to take the tip of the surprised Palestinian’s left ring finger and then closed to nip it off.
Salah lifted his hand, unbelieving. The finger was simply gone from the top knuckle, severed with surgical neatness. It wasn’t even bleeding. It simply wasn’t there. The two men looked at it, thunderstruck. And then Richard’s R/T exploded into life. All along the line, from port to starboard, the horrified seamen had seen the deck open and close at their feet.
Richard sprang upright, overcoming the force of the storm by sheer will. He stood astride the breaking seam, facing out to port. There was no denying it: his left leg felt the engine’s throb. His right leg did not. Then, in a motion that translated itself almost into seasickness in his taut belly, he felt the bow on his right ride down the back of a great wave while the stern on his left was still riding up it. This time they all heard the Clang! as the two halves closed together again.
There was no training for this situation. He kept up, like any competent professional, with the literature of his profession, but nowhere had he ever seen the article he needed now: “Correct Procedures to Be Followed During the Break-up of Supertankers in Heavy Seas.” If he survived, perhaps he should write it.
But it was laughable even to be thinking like this. What they needed now was seamanship and leadership. Or nobody would be going home.
Was there time to secure the two halves of the ship together in some way? Out of the question. Dismissed at once.
Was there time to bring her head round so the seas hit beam-on and stopped working the weak joint? The instant the thought occurred he was on the R/T. “John! John, this is Richard. Bring her head round.”
“Aye. What bearing?”
“Fifty-five.” But would the torque of the turn widen the crack? Cause it to split apart altogether? God knew.
What next? He raised his R/T and opened the general band. “Attention all. Attention all. This is the captain speaking. Anyone forward of the Sampson posts, return to the bridge at once. Report in forecastle head watch.”