All it would take was one concerted rocket attack. Fate was not as solid as it looked.
With these thoughts threatening to burst his head as his heart threatened to tear itself from his mutilated breast, he hurled himself out onto the flat roof of the tallest prefab facing south and, with binoculars jammed almost painfully into his eyes, he looked out into the evening sky.
Five miles due east, heading west at twenty knots, Robin Mariner was also studying the southern sky. She was standing on the afterdeck of Prometheus, between the swimming pool and the helipad. Behind her, the tanker’s little Westland Wasp was uncovered, unfettered, fueled and ready to go. Robin was of two minds about her part in Richard’s plan. She understood everything he had told her about the importance of total surprise — that was elementary. And she saw that it followed logically that he had to be careful how he used the radio, therefore. Ben would know by now that Prometheus had vanished. He would realize that the people most likely to move her this fast were her owners. He would be expecting them to be up to something, listening for clues of their whereabouts, ready to start executing hostages at the first whisper of them. It was absolutely imperative that the first solid indication of her presence would be her bows bearing down on him at full speed, so close that he had to start defending his command at once, for only then did the hostages stand a chance. And again, it followed from that, that the only way to get the help they so desperately needed was to go and ask for it. Only she, in the Westland, could do that. But all along she really knew what this was all about: Richard wanted her and the baby well clear of Prometheus and Fate when the two of them came together.
So she stood, calculatingly, beside the little helicopter, looking south and thinking. But then her thoughts began to be disturbed by what she was looking at. Even without the aid of binoculars, it was clear something was wrong down there. The sky between here and Sharja City was black. Not with early evening. Not even with clouds. With something more. It chilled her to look at that roiling black mass even when she had no clear idea what she was seeing. Some atavistic memory buried deep in her bones made her blood run cold as she watched it sweeping toward her, high in the last of the south wind. She hesitated. What should she do? Should she depart from the plan in the last instants before it got properly under way? Should she go up onto the bridge and warn Richard? Pop into the surgery and tell Asha before she took off? She had put her personal radio in the Westland when she was getting it ready. It was on the pilot’s seat. She could sit inside and talk to the bridge from there. A couple of quick words about this strange biblical phenomenon then off to get help. As she turned to climb into the helicopter’s little cabin, something landed on the deck behind her and hopped into the pool.
“Steady as you go,” said John from behind the collision alarm radar. “I’ve got a clear echo. You should be able to see it now. Dead ahead, five miles.”
“The light’s going pretty quickly,” answered Richard, concern creeping into his voice. “What’s the time?”
“Eighteen hundred. Dead on sunset. You should be all right for light.”
“There’s some kind of cloud or fog coming in from starboard. Damned if I can make it out. Strangest thing.”
Richard’s personal radio buzzed. He lifted his left hand from the helm and raised the black box like a telephone handset, never taking his eyes off the sea ahead. “Yes?”
“It’s Robin. There’s some kind of cloud coming up out of Sharja…”
“I see it. It’s reaching right round to Hormuz by the look of it. You’d better steer clear of it when you take off.”
“Don’t worry. I will!”
“And Robin…”
“Yes?”
“I love you. Take care.”
“I love you too, Richard. Oh, my God!”
“Robin! Robin, what is it? Robin!”
Asha was busy in the surgery, tensely preparing her medical equipment to receive the wounded. She had talked it over with Richard and they were both of the opinion that she had better get ready for gunshot wounds. And she knew exactly what she would need to treat those, after her recent experiences with John.
Her personal radio buzzed.
Richard’s voice said, “Asha! Come in, Asha!” He sounded worried.
“Yes, Richard?”
“Something’s the matter with Robin. Check for me, would you?”
Asha glanced through the porthole. It was too murky out there to see anything clearly. She thought of opening it, but it was secured by four butterfly bolts. Instead, she crossed to the door, went out into the corridor, turned right and right again, into the gym. It was dark in here, even this early. The lights had been smashed when the ceiling had been riddled by terrorist bullets. She looked up, expecting to see starlight through the holes in the roof. Nothing. Except…
She reached the glass-paneled door through which she had released Bob and John and paused with her hand on the handle looking out. Darkness was snowing down. Physically. It was as though the blackness of the sky had been broken into pieces like strange snowflakes and was settling here in a blizzard.
The helicopter was gone, the sound of its departure lost under the thunder.
Then the noise registered, and its significance, just as the weakened ceiling of the gym started to collapse under the weight of them.
“Locusts!” Fatima yelled at him. “It’s a plague of locusts!”
Ben stood, transfixed, looking up at them as the rays of the setting sun abruptly shone from beneath them. In that instant, the black, swirling mass of them was transformed into an infinity of burning dots. Wings flashed like sword blades catching the light, bodies glittered, hard-shelled legs glinted. Multifaceted eyes glowed. And the light vanished.
“They ate the light,” whispered Ben, awed by them.
But Fatima did not hesitate. She took him by his good arm and pulled him back inside. For she had seen what he had not. The locusts were coming down. Within an instant of the door closing behind them, the first massive grasshopper body thudded onto the thin, prefabricated roof above them. And that first, isolated noise was soon followed by others, pattering down onto the pale surfaces like the outriders of a storm.
They ran back down to the foreman’s office as quickly as Ben could go, strangely disturbed by the invasion of the creatures, but hardly counting them as having any effect on their plans. They could secure the doors and windows well enough. What did it matter to them what landed on the outside?
But as Ben had observed, the locusts had all but eaten the light. Already the tankers heading to and from Hor- muz were almost invisible, except for on the radar. In fact, over all the Gulf it seemed, darkness gathered at the beck of the creatures until nothing remained visible except the last of the sunset on the upper works of one final tanker, coming west, out of sequence, farther south than all the others. Seemingly heading straight for the platform itself.