Home.
Humming a little tune to himself, he went off to look for Robin. When he found her, he would take her to the officers’ pantry and they would make a cup of cocoa, drink it, and go to bed. It was what they did at midnight every night when they were at sea together. The prospect of it made his contentment complete, almost as though he were insensible to the danger they would be in tomorrow.
In eighteen hours’ time every single one of them could be dead.
They were up again before six, well aware that it would take the better part of twelve hours to get sufficient water aboard to make Prometheus seem like just another laden tanker outbound through Hormuz.
As the swift dawn broke into yet another stifling day, so they worked, with Richard firmly in command and — typically — the most active. To pipe heads standing three feet high, they attached great hoses that reached left and right across the deck before the bridgehouse. The deck railings were opened, and the ends of the hoses rolled overboard to fall thundering against Prometheus’s high sides, down into the sluggish sea. The ends of the hoses plunged deep beneath the surface, dragged back toward the stern at once by the tanker’s steady progress through the water.
Richard ran to the cargo control room at once. Its long window looked forward to where the pipes were attached. Here Robin was just completing the programming of the computers according to the plans they had agreed on last night. Now the Mariners stood shoulder to shoulder as she punched in the final instructions. The computers immediately communicated with the pumps in the pump room three sheer decks below. The main pumps thundered into life, sucking in water past the filters at the pipes’ ends. As it came aboard, the filtered water was fed immediately into a system of smaller pipes controlled by secondary pumps that passed it in carefully measured increments evenly into the tanks along Prometheus’s massive length.
In the cargo control room, displays automatically monitored the disposition of the cargo. Schematics of the ship lit up, each tank represented by a safe green box, as strategically located sensors read the forces unleashed by the movement of the liquid through the system. The greatest danger came from the shear force, that terrific tension that could arise at the junction of improperly laden tanks where the upward force of a buoyant empty tank ran up against the downward force of a full one. Mistakes in lading could tear — had torn — tankers apart in seconds.
But Robin was far too competent a cargo-control officer to allow anything of the kind to happen. And in any case, the task of controlling the oncoming water as it passed relatively slowly along two basic channels was not one she would find particularly hard. She was used to calculating the shear forces unleashed when six or eight tanks were being loaded all at once. They stood side by side in silence until it was clear that the programs were coping successfully with the work. Then Richard looked at his watch. “The automatic alarms will ring here, in the engine room, and on the bridge if there’s a problem,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They took the watch at once, early. Richard crossed to the helm and relieved Weary with a clap on the shoulder that made the big man jump and look around, bewildered.
“Time for some rest, Doc,” he said.
The sound of his name stopped the frown of confusion on Doc’s face and he turned away with a grin to shamble over toward Chris, who was dozing on her feet by the collision alarm radar. Robin went over to C. J. Martyr, the only one of the watchkeepers truly awake. When she put her hand on his shoulder, he automatically rubbed it with his steel-stubbled jawline, a piece of easy intimacy as though she were as much of a daughter to him as was Christine.
“I’d never have believed he could have survived,” he rumbled, talking to Richard as much as to her. “And given that he did, I’d never have thought he would come back like this.”
The first Prometheus had been breaking up, splitting in two halfway down her long deck in a storm in the En- glish Channel. Martyr and Robin had been out on that doomed deck together in pursuit of the man who had masterminded poisonings and murders to cover the illegal sale of her cargo, and the lethal attempts to have her sunk for insurance. That man had been the first officer, the captain’s godson, Ben Strong. When the ship had broken up, Richard, Salah, and the others had saved the two of them. And they had all seen Ben Strong, splayed on the forward section, whirled away to destruction as it had sunk. How could a man trapped in such a cataclysm, sucked down to such an end, return ten years later to take his mad revenge? Or, more correctly from the look of things, to make the settling of his account with Heritage Mariner a part of his larger plan.
For it was clear enough, and had been from the outset as they looked back on it, now wise with hindsight, that the pirating of Prometheus II was almost incidental to the overall plan. A ruse to keep the eyes of the world on one end of the Gulf while the real work went on at the other. Preoccupied with the drama at Bushehr, who had given a second thought to Fate? The planning behind it, the preparation, and the cunning were deeply disturbing. Perhaps the cunning most of all. While they were on Fate, waiting for a lost ship, unaware that she would never come, the terrorists’ defenses were at their lowest, and Richard’s plan stood a chance. But the moment they realized that Dawn of Freedom was not coming, the instant that they realized that something had gone wrong — anything at all — such a well-prepared, clever team as Ben Strong had assembled would be bound to come up with an equally effective alternative. And once they did that, the whole world was likely to be helpless, as it had been in the affair so far. And then what hope would the team on Prometheus stand? Eight desperate people undermanning a half-empty supertanker.
At the helm, Richard glanced up at the chronometers above his head. 08:59 local time. Good. Caught it this time. “Log on, Robin, will you? And, just as you do, get the radio please.”
They crossed to the chart table where the logbook lay, then Martyr stayed, tidying up his entry before he signed over to Robin. She hit the switch on the receiver and a quiet voice filled the bridge.
“This is the BBC World Service. Here is the news at six o’clock A.M., Greenwich Mean Time…”
“You think we’re going to be on it?” asked Robin, her voice brittle, caught between playfulness and grimness.
“If we are, I hope it hasn’t been updated recently. If I were Ben, I’d be tuned in to it. It might just be a useful early warning. Best he’ll have, unless he has a satellite receiver down there and a television for the twenty-four-hour news stations.” Richard’s voice, unnaturally gruff, was beginning to show the strain. She couldn’t read his expression, outlined as he was by the blinding glare.
“…news from Tehran of the continuing power struggle within the Iranian armed forces. Sources close to the Iranian government suggest that it is the officers in the Iranian Air Force who are loyal to the regime. Officers in the Iranian Navy, however…”
“This is getting close,” said Robin. “Wait for it!”
“The United States Sixth fleet continues to perform maneuvers in the Gulf of Oman but has yet to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The White House reiterated yesterday that, while the current climate persists, the fleet will not…”
“No, it’s too long,” said Robin with some relief. “I don’t think they’ll mention us…”
“There is no doubt however, that the taking of the Heritage Mariner supertanker Prometheus Two, with its full complement of forty men and women, has considerably worsened an already tense situation. There is no further news of Sir William Heritage, chairman of Heritage Mariner. And still no official reaction from Heritage Mariner itself.”