The excitement died the moment she saw Cecil Smyke. It was replaced with a sort of dull horror she had been at great pains to disguise from the others, indulging it only after her separation from them when she was alone. But she was not the sort of woman to give in to weakness and she soon began to use her rela- tive liberty to put together a cache of the sort of equipment she would need if and when she tried to make her escape.
At last, the only thing keeping her here was the certainty that she had not been mistaken in her first hopes: Fatima was on Prometheus somewhere. But how could Fatima have been party to the murder of Cecil Smyke? And why hadn’t she made some sort of contact?
The fifth night of captivity was literally hellish. The air outside the bridge was so horrifically stultifying that even in the coolness of the air-conditioned rooms, something of that fierce Gulf heat intruded. Certainly the thunderous atmosphere in the dark air above caused fractiousness, short tempers, and colossal headaches in everyone aboard. Asha was prone to atmospheric migraines and fought this one by standing under a shower set exactly at blood heat for the better part of an hour. At about seven she emerged, cool enough to feel a slight chill from the air-conditioning, and consequently she caught up a towel to wrap around herself even though she knew she would regret it later when she became too hot to sleep. The action was providential because otherwise she would have been naked when she walked into her cabin and found the terrorist leader there.
She froze, thunderstruck by his presence here. Automatically she opened her mouth to scream. But the instant she did so, the window behind his shoulder was filled with an explosion of lightning like Armageddon and the immediate havoc of thunder was like Judgment Day. The deafening pyrotechnics of the storm gave them pause and some semblance of calm had returned to the situation before communication became possible. He made no move toward her as the thunder rolled on and on, so she walked past him to her wardrobe and put on a long silk dressing gown.
As she did so, a second claw of lightning pounced down toward the desert. This time the thunder was, if anything, louder. She kicked her bare feet into open sandals and, sweeping her hair back over one broad shoulder, she confronted him again.
“Is this a social call?” she demanded as the echoes rumbled into silence. And their eyes locked. Hers beneath imperious brows, tawny; his deep-shadowed under the folds of his kaffiyah, dark brown, almost black. Not quite sane.
Lightning crackled down outside and an odor of ozone permeated the unquiet air. Had he answered, it would have been lost in the avalanche of sound outside. Instead, he raised his scarred hands to his shirt collar and began to unbutton it. At once she drew herself up, eyes busy around her cabin, looking for a weapon. But when she looked back into his mad black gaze, something she saw there stopped her. And the thought that rapists usually start with their trousers, not their shirts. She looked down at what he was doing and understood. By the time he pulled the shirt off altogether, she was total professionalism, concentrating absolutely. Her mind focused so that even the cataclysm outside receded until nothing existed but her expertise and his poor, twisted body.
He seemed to have been crushed. That was the only explanation that sprang to mind. She could only see his torso, of course, but nothing else could explain what she was looking at. The left side of his body seemed to have been crushed beneath some unimaginable thing or force. Something so massive that it should have killed him. Would have been far more merciful if it had killed him. Crushed him until his broken bones had cut their way out through his flesh. Then they had simply been tucked back into him and allowed to heal that way. He held himself erect. He seemed to move freely, normally. How he did so, she could not think: by the exercise of indomitable will. The twisted, tortured muscles stretching over the strange angular bones should not have worked at all. The bones themselves should not have held together. The joints, those many joints between ribs, breastbone, spine, shoulder, arm, hand, should not have worked. He should not have been able to breathe or move. This body should not contain life.
Looking at it in dumb wonder, she was reminded of a haunting story she had once read where the survivor of a space crash in some far distant galaxy had been saved by kindly alien surgeons who had sewn her back together — but they did so without ever having seen a human body before. The result must have been something like this, she supposed.
He did not flinch when her fingers probed gently down the twisted columns of his trapezius and latissimus dorsi, that long range of muscular hills astride the valley of his spine. The skin itself was not extensively scarred here, but from shoulder to knuckle on the left arm there was a network of scars the smallest end of which had served to distinguish this man from the other terrorists. He could have been crushed in a road accident, she supposed. Or trapped under a collapsing building.
“There is nothing I can do for you. You know that.”
“You can give me something for the pain.”
She watched in fascination as the muscles writhed into awkward but effective motion. He must have been tended by someone with no medical knowledge at all. “Oh, I can do that all right, but I don’t think anyone could make this better.”
“It was the hand of Allah, blessings be upon Him: it would be a sacrilege to make it better. But sometimes at night I weaken, for He asks me to bear more than I can endure. And I need…I need…”
Thunder drowned out what he said, but she knew what he needed well enough. “You’d better come down to the surgery.”
On the way down, her mind worked rapidly, trying to turn the situation to her best advantage. The scope for action was large. Ultimately she could kill him if she wanted: he would have no idea what she was actually giving him, after all. But that was a course of action she could not contemplate for long, even under these circumstances. She could try something that might yield long-term rewards without causing immediate reprisals, however. She could try for information.
“You should keep a supply of pills with you,” she told him when they arrived. “But for now, I’ll give you an injection that will act more quickly. Only one injection. Then you’ll have to rely on the pills.” She paused, half hoping he would take the tablets and go. But he sat obediently on the examination table and rolled up his right sleeve.
Asha slid the long needle into his pale flesh and depressed the plunger. The porthole lit up dazzlingly and instant thunder roared. She held her breath and slid the needle out. John, Bob, and the rest were just next door. She felt their proximity acutely. God! How she wanted to help them. “Just stay sitting down,” she advised gently. “It will make you feel a little sleepy, I expect. I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. Lie down if you’d like to.”
He swung round at her suggestion and lay back. His hands went to the folds of his kaffiyah but then hesitated. He had no intention that she should see his face. “Switch off the light,” he croaked.
Sitting in the dark beside him she waited until the rhythm of his breathing told her he was asleep.
“How did it happen?” she asked quietly.
“…ship…” His voice was sleepy. Dreamy. The drug she had given him had killed his pain. Put him to sleep. Left him susceptible to suggestion, like sodiumpentathol. He would answer her questions quite freely for a while if she was careful what she asked.
“A ship…” she prompted.
“The bastard killed my father. He deserved everything he got. God, he was so easy to fool. Me. The owner. The Afrikaaners. Everybody fooled him. No oil. No problem. But she had to sink, you see. No evidence. No comebacks. Full insurance. Had to sink. Ask old Ben. Good old chap. Shift the ballast, tank to tank. Break her back.”