The six of them assembled briefly in the cockpit while the helicopter thundered away. But they split into teams almost at once. Salah, uninvolved with the planning of the course, took the con — more as lookout than steersman because they weren’t going anywhere yet. Martyr, in charge of the radio in Sam’s place, reported safe arrival to Angus in Manama. The other four went below.
No sooner were they in the cabin than Richard had the chart on the table. “The current weather pattern is set to hold for the forseeable future,” he began. “So it seems we can rely on southerlies during the day building up to gale force in the late afternoon, and northerlies at night. We really want to head west and we can get across either wind fairly efficiently.” He glanced down at his watch. “If you agree to my rough sailing plan, Doc, then we can be away at seventeen hundred hours on the dot. Now here’s what I propose.” They all leaned forward as he gestured over the sand, purple, aquamarine, and white of Admiralty chart number 2858 spread out flat before them.
“Here we are at Fate. Here’s where we want to be, at Bushehr. There is no direct course we can sail because the Iranian coast comes out so far down here, but it is three hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. Clearly we have to dogleg round the coast of Iran, so we have to go west and then almost due north. But if we simply do that, then we lose a great deal of advantage from the wind and Katapult’s speed.
“So what I propose is this. First, we set a course southwest down to Zarakkuh here. That’s one hundred and eighty miles. We’ll have this southerly to run across for another hour or so, but then we should have that northerly at our shoulder until we’re there. By my calculations that should be at oh two hundred hours tomorrow morning.
“At Zarakkuh we tack into a northwesterly course, which gives us a second leg of three hundred and thirty miles to a point out here about twenty miles southwest of Prometheus. From the moment we tack until dawn we’ll be going across this northerly sailing upwind, but from dawn onward we’ll have the downwind reach, and we can really get up some speed. I’ve allowed twelve hours for that and so we should be in position for our final tack at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.
“About twenty miles from Prometheus, we make that final tack. It won’t be much of one — just enough to bring us in at full speed. We’ll have that southerly, at near storm force, steadily under our tails and, knowing Katapult, we can get across those last few miles in no time at all. They won’t be expecting us. Even when they see us they won’t suspect anything. What will we be, after all? A pleasure boat only just in control, running down the wind far too fast. We’ll go alongside her at full speed, showing off, and get tangled in her anchor chain. While Chris and Robin make a meal out of freeing her, the rest of us go up the way Salah and I went up last time. Then we move down the deck under cover of the pipes.”
He looked around at their faces, trying to read the thoughts behind them. Martyr’s lean figure suddenly cut out the light from the companionway. “All clear with Angus,” he said.
“Right,” said Richard. “Seventeen hundred hours local. By this time tomorrow Prometheus will be free. Let’s do it.”
Salah stood almost at the top of the mast, looking out into the gusty afternoon. He had climbed up the footholds at the front and then turned so that the raked upright leaned back behind him and the shrouds stretched out from their junction just above his head, convenient to his hands. The boat’s motion had moderated as her head swung into the wind, and now he found himself staring up and out at Fate. The huge platform towered above him, all rusty sands and russets and reds. A spider’s web of girders stretched between its four great limbs and there the wind sang even more loudly than the surf thundered against the hollow iron members. With the power of the sinking sun throwing brightness and shadow starkly across it, the disused platform looked solid, businesslike, threatening.
And it felt to Salah, looking up, that there was someone hidden up there, looking down at him.
Then the others came cascading up into the cockpit. “Seventeen hundred hours,” sang out Martyr, the log keeper. “Under way at seventeen hundred hours.”
Chapter Sixteen
They tacked in the darkness off Zarakkuh at 2 A.M. precisely, having established their position by dead reckoning and checked it by the stars. As they settled into the long upwind reach, their speed fell off initially, but the northerly was steady at about force five on the Beaufort scale, more than enough to keep them creaming along until the first few gusts from the south came over their shoulders soon after dawn. It had been obvious from the outset that they had three watch teams of two. Richard and Robin took charge of their progress from Fate to Zarakkuh, then woke Salah and C. J. The four of them oversaw the tack and then the English couple went to bed.
Weary and Chris were up with the dawn, refreshed by a long sleep. Doc came-to knowing who he was, even after the better part of twelve hours’ rest, though Chris, at his side even before his eyes opened, was haunted by the way he kept looking for Sam Hood. They did not relieve Malik and Martyr at once, preferring to do odd jobs around the boat and double-check everything that might let them down at the last moment.
As soon as the southerly puffed into existence, Weary retrimmed the sails, and the multihull took off like an express train. The wind rapidly built to force seven, twenty-seven knots without variation, and Katapult’s knot meter raced past thirty as she exploded joyfully through the white-backed waves. It was only then that the two senior watchkeepers retired, salt-rimed and soaking, to get what rest they could below in a hull that reverberated like a gong as she smashed through every comber. It was exhilarating sailing, the kind Katapult was built for — and she still had not reached the limits of her specifications. Richard and Robin rose for lunch and the four of them spent an exciting couple of hours as though they were boating off Portland Bill with no dangers approaching and no deaths at their door.
At two, twelve hours after the tack at Zarrakuh, they tacked again onto the other side of the downwind reach. Weary spent five minutes fine trimming the sails while Richard held the con, then suddenly, Doc hit Chris on the shoulder and they were off, agile as monkeys, about some business they had secretly planned. Chris passed down the side of the forward boom while Doc vanished momentarily from Richard’s dazzled sight, only to reappear halfway up the mast, climbing rapidly, a block and tackle over his shoulder, trailing ropes.
“Good God, they’re…” He turned, speaking, to Robin, but she had guessed what they were up to at the same moment as he had, and was gone to help them.
High on the mast, Weary made the block and tackle secure at the base of the damaged section, then shinned back down again at top speed, to career across the bucking, spray-washed deck. Chris ran back and hit a button on the dashboard that Richard had hardly noticed, and from the forecastle head, a jib boom began to telescope outward. Robin was laying out the ropes ready. Lazy sheet, after-guy, fore-guy down the midships; the sheet and the lazy guy. It was all ready with amazing rapidity, as though the four of them had crewed round-the-world racers together for years. Then they were back in the cockpit again, Weary beside Richard at the helm. “Now, Captain, you just keep your eye on the knot meter, please,” yelled the Australian over the sound of the wind and the sea. “I want a witness to this. Go!” And the three of them were heaving on the ropes as Richard fought to keep the wheel from chucking him overboard. Miraculously, breathtakingly, beyond the luff of the foresail, reaching out on that new boom and spread across the wind at once, soaring up to that straining tackle high on the mast, bloomed the spinnaker.