As time passed, the campaign had its effect beyond questions of morale. The guards became tired, snappish, dangerous. As the endless days dragged by, a tense situation was escalated toward the explosive. And all the pressure settled upon the head of one man. The man responsible for the whole situation. The leader of the terrorists.
They singled him out for special attention. They never missed an opportunity to challenge his authority or undermine his power. They gestured silently behind his back. They reacted more slowly to his orders. They were more stupid, clumsy, childish when he was around. They exercised their ingenuity to the utmost trying to destroy him in ways that would not cause him to destroy them first. And, indeed, as four days passed, then five, the strain on him did seem to be intensifying beyond bearing. Almost as if he were waiting for something. Something that should have happened some time ago, but had not.
That was another objective of their endless communication games — speculation. Who were these people? What did they want? How could they be defeated? The regimen they imposed made anything other than guesswork extremely difficult, but in those early days speculation was rife. John and Bob collected it, sifted it, and filed it. Both of them knew with increasing certainty that the only way to get hard facts was to run the risk again that John had taken at once — to get thrown out. Only outside the gym was there a real chance to gather solid information. Only out there, in the little Westland helicopter, was there any real chance for escape. But the Westland had no fuel aboard, and only Bob knew how to fly it.
Kerem Khalil and Twelve Toes Ho became part of the central committee too, for they could begin to supply some information about what was going on outside. Their men were doing the cooking, cleaning, and other odd jobs required by the terrorists. Anyone who went out of the gym for whatever reason was thoroughly grilled on his return. Were there guards outside? How many? Had they seen one set relieve another or were they all on duty all the time? Where were the terrorists sleeping? Eating? Keeping watches? Even visits to the latrine became like sorties into enemy territory.
Life for Asha Quartermaine was very different. She was given much more freedom to move around the bridgehouse from her quarters, to her surgery, to the library. Whereas the others filled their days with their games to ward off that terrifying boredom, she caught up with her reading and plotted alone.
She saw no one from the crew at all after that first tending of John’s bruised skull. When the stewards were preparing or serving food she was kept well away. Her own meals were always brought by the slightest of the terrorists — the one she suspected of being a woman — and eaten alone. She had her own small shower and toilet in her quarters so she never needed to use the crew’s. When the crew went to the toilet or the showers she was again kept clear so that not even the most intricate planning on her part could bring about an apparently accidental meeting with John or Bob. She began to feel more than lonely — she began to feel distanced. Deserted. No matter what John had said about including her in any plans they made, she began to feel that they had abandoned her.
And so she worked on her own plans.
Her whole reason for being here, the outcome of nearly a year’s work and planning, was to contact her twin sister. She was the elder by a matter of minutes, but that fact colored her relationship with Fatima. Asha was the maternal, paternal, strongly protective half. The reliable one. The caring one. The doctor. Fatima had been wild, mischievous, adventurous. The romantic. The political activist. The reporter. The thought of her Fatima, trapped in a foreign society, that brave soul of freedom caged by the whim of a born-again Muslim father, was more than Asha could stand. She blamed herself for allowing Fatima to go to his bedside. She tortured herself with the thought of what it must be like for the flamboyant feminist to be held in the most repressive of conditions. Alone and friendless after her divorce from Giles Quartermaine, she had become almost morbidly worried about Fatima. And then the first letter had arrived. Posted during her flight through Dahran immediately after her escape from their father’s house, it told of Fatima’s life there and how she was now free.
That first letter had begun the transformation of Asha’s life. For a start, it had emphasized how much had already changed since Fatima had been taken away — her young sister had no idea she was now divorced from Giles Quartermaine. Indeed, part of that turbulent missive proposed that Asha should get Giles to run a series of programs for Western television about the terrible injustice of forcing liberated women into conditions she described as medieval servitude.
Giles Quartermaine, in fact, featured largely in Fatima’s early proposals, for that first letter was followed by others. The tenor of the letters changed as time went by, and Asha came to suspect the truth: that Fatima’s offers of journalistic contacts within various terrorist cadres actually included Fatima herself. Asha’s divorce from Giles Quartermaine had been reported quite widely, but nowhere Fatima could read about it, and the reason for her ignorance became disturbingly clear: freedom fighters such as she had become no longer read Western gossip columns. So her little sister continued to refer to her ex-husband, relying on him to guarantee her worldwide publicity as soon as she required it.
The letters did not arrive regularly or often. There were by no means many of them tucked in Asha’s writing case in her cabin, but there were quite enough to give the elder sister a firm idea of her twin’s rough whereabouts. With nothing to lose, therefore, Asha had handed in her notice at the small hospital she had been working in since the divorce and started to plan how she could get to the Middle East — preferably the Gulf — to look for Fatima. Becoming a ship’s doctor aboard tankers filling at Kharg Island gave her just what she needed — a feeling of being close to Fatima and a steady job into the bargain. She would probably have drifted onto Heritage Mariner’s ships eventually in any case — after BP they were the largest British tanker fleet — but for some reason she could never quite fathom, they featured once or twice by name in Fatima’s letters. She came onto their fleet on purpose, therefore, and found the friendly atmosphere aboard was very much to her taste. And so, amid the companionship so sorely lacking in her life since the double blow of the kidnap and the divorce, she began to let time slip by.
Then the last letter arrived: the one that had brought her here. It was another one for Giles, really, though addressed to her at their old home and forwarded, like the others, by her bank. In it, Fatima offered her dazzling brother-in-law the veiled promise of a scoop. All he had to do, she hinted, was to keep an eye on the Gulf in general and on Heritage Mariner’s flagship in particular. At first, Asha thought of handing the letter to the authorities or even to Richard Mariner himself — but in the end either action seemed too much like a betrayal of Fatima. So she simply folded it up, put it with the rest, and contacted the ship’s doctor on Prometheus. Would he mind swapping berths for a trip or two? Of course not. And so it had been done. Her motivation was as uncomplicated as it had been since she had lost Fatima: to get her little sister back again. Or to see her — perhaps talk to her — at the very least. She had been almost relieved to come out of the hold behind John Higgins and find the deck crowded with terrorists.