Once again they came near the tanker. Once again the air was filled with the sound of male voices shouting indistinctly. But as they passed back into the wind shadow exactly astern of her, the quiet air suddenly made the sounds clearer. And Christine looked up, surprised to discover that there were no wolf whistles this time, only cheers.
Chapter Twelve
Weary exploded awake jerking and writhing on the sole of the cockpit with such force it took two of them to hold him down. His huge, leonine head thrashed from side to side. His startlingly blue eyes rolled, empty of any knowledge. It was as though he were having a seizure. Christine wasn’t repulsed or disturbed at all. Quite the reverse. She had done this sort of thing before, helping the other inmates of the detox clinic. She wrapped both her arms round his right arm and hugged it to her, frowning with concentration while Sam went through what was clearly a ritual, reminding him who he was.
“Who’re you?” Doc’s bright blue eyes were suddenly fixed on Christine’s green ones. The massive head rose off the deck. His fist closed on her shirtfront, screwing it up until it seemed as though he would tear it off. He pulled until their faces were scant inches apart. She felt herself being sucked in. The irises shaded from the near white of the sky at dawn to the indigo of evening behind the first bright star.
“I’m Chris, and you’re Doc,” she said gently, calmly, joining in the therapy. “You’re Doc Weary.” And Doc knew who he was again.
And who they were: “Hi, Chris,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Hit your head.”
“Did I? I don’t remember. Jeez!” He began to struggle up. “What’s going on?” They let him go and he was on his feet at once, striding over to stand by the wheel, looking past the sodden mass of the foresail to the duncolored coast of Iran. Ras al Kuh was back on their port bow and the whole bay stretched out before them. Behind the flat water, a low series of sandbars elevated themselves into dunes before collapsing into swamps beyond. It was a dangerous lee shore, shallow and poorly charted; but it was all they had. Yelling explanations, recriminations, congratulations one to the other, they dropped the anchor, letting Katapult swing until she faced the wind and the hook took firm hold, leaving a couple of fathoms of clear water beneath them.
It was late afternoon by now, nearly five local time. They had little more than an hour of daylight to complete their damage check. The fiercest heat was going out of the day and the wind beginning to die down, but this was no cool evening nor any sort of an atmosphere for heavy work. Yet the work had to be done, and so they set to it.
First Doc climbed the mast using footholds so cleverly designed that those few visible seemed to perform an aerodynamic function. After a few moments’ close inspection he called down, “Sam, it looks quite fair up here.”
“No more damage?”
“Not even from switching it on after the sail ripped out?” Chris couldn’t believe it. She had had visions of the complete mechanism being destroyed by her desperate action.
“No. That wouldn’t do this system any harm.”
She started checking over the jumble of drying sail with her father, trying to put it into some kind of order for ease of further handling. She had changed back into the bikini and if anyone had noticed, no one had made any remark. Up and down the front of the mast went Doc, peering into the thin vertical opening at the mechanism inside. At last he crouched down beside the joint with the telescopic boom. Chris moved up and crouched beside him, fascinated. No sooner did she do so than she felt a firm touch on her upper thigh. She jumped like a startled colt. Her whole body flinched. She looked up, eyes wide. But it was only Doc, preoccupied, trying to catch her attention, with no idea at all of the effect he was having on her. He was holding a stub of metal out for her to see. “Main masthead retaining clip,” he said. “What holds the top of the foresail in the furling mechanism. If it fails, the sail falls down. And look at it.”
He crouched closer, his left knee thrust between her thighs, to brush the front of her bikini. All his attention on the clip, moving it so that she could see how it was cracked from side to side.
“Design fault,” she said. “I’d sue the builder to hell and gone.”
“Too bloody true!” The grip on her thigh intensified; then it was gone as he levered himself erect. “Sam,” he called, striding past her. “Look at this. Ten-dollar clip nearly cost us a quarter-of-a-million-dollar boat. Can you believe it!”
By sunset he was back aloft, sitting in a makeshift boatswain’s chair secured by block and tackle to the damaged masthead. By 18:45, he was satisfied, and they rethreaded the sail back into the front of the mast, securing it safely into a spare set of clips. By 19:45, they were ready to sail again and by then the unusual meteorological physics of the day had been reversed by the relative coolness of the night. The Iranian desert, under clear skies, was little short of freezing; a brisk “northeaster” sprang up to push them quickly south. In moments, Weary had plotted the rhumb line to the dumping ground and they were off again on a course slightly to the north of it, trusting the tide and weather to drift them safely into position above the explosives. Somehow, during all of this, the watches had changed their composition so that when Hood went below to prepare supper, the watch mate who accompanied him was Martyr.
Chris stood by Doc, shoulder to shoulder. Her eyes followed his in the practiced sweep from instruments to water ahead. And they needed to keep a keen-eyed watch. They were showing running lights, as were most of the other ships in the dark gulf, but there might be some coastal craft in the vicinity who didn’t bother with such niceties. The tankers, every one of them showing the legally required running lights and additional lighting, nevertheless posed a more subtle threat. They were so large, and were, as usual, following in such close sequence that it was possible — no, disturbingly easy — to become confused by the distance between bow and stern lights, and try to sail through the middle of the tanker itself rather than before or behind it. This danger was compounded by the absence of deck lights or any lights visible in the heavily curtained bridge-houses except the dimly illuminated navigation bridges themselves. And, of course, almost all the tankers’ hulls were black, making them absolutely invisible in the dark.
Total concentration was needed at all times. But in the way of practiced sailors, they kept up a conversation at the same time.
“What’s it like when you can’t remember who you are?”
Doc paused before answering. No one had ever dared ask him this question before. “When you were a kid, did you ever wake up in the middle of the night all alone and afraid of the dark?”
“Sure.”
“I mean really terrified for no reason at all. No nightmares, no monsters, no nothing: just the dark.”
“I guess. Sometimes.”
“Well, it’s like that. Only the darkness is inside, somehow. And I don’t know where the light switch is.”
“The light switch with your name on it.”