“Three miles. Can you see it now, Richard?”
“Barely, John. I’m looking straight into the sunset now, but it’ll be gone in another minute. There’s something else, though. I still can’t make it…”
The radio buzzed again. “Yes?”
“Locusts, Richard. It’s a huge cloud of locusts.”
“Asha. How’s Robin?” He asked almost automatically. Asha’s words had made scales drop from his eyes. As though he had put on spectacles, he saw what was happening clearly.
“She’s gone. The helicopter got clear.”
“Thank God.”
“The locusts are settling back here, though. The weight of them is making the gym cave in.”
Of course they would be settling! The thought appeared out of nowhere, The ship was green. The horde of insects probably thought it was edible.
He hit the deck lights. They flooded on. Their glare was soaked up by the swarm and the very air seemed to catch fire as their bodies reflected the beams.
“Two miles, Richard.”
Only eight times their length to go. “Guide me. The deck lights have helped, but I still can’t see. I’m going in blind.” His eyes whirled with the confusion of insect bodies dancing in front of him. They were all he could see; they were the last thing he needed to see. His right hand was like rock on the helm.
He thumbed SEND on his radio again. “Two miles, Katapult. Watch out for the locusts. Good luck.”
Fully laden, Prometheus rode low in the water, her deck only twenty feet above the surface. Only the narrowest part of her cutwater showed at the bow, cleaving through the flat sea at twenty knots. Fifty feet above the water, her white bridge-wings thrust out on either side, clear of the hull itself, overhanging it by ten clear feet. Above the bridge, another thirty feet of housing supported the tanker’s communications equipment, dishes, and aerials. Above that stood her funnel, the smoke it was giving out lost to view immediately among the clouds of locusts there. For a moment after the lights came on, the locusts hesitated. Only their weakest had settled so far, a curtain of bodies like a rain shower beneath the thunderheads of the swarm. Between the water and the mass of the locusts just above Prometheus’s funnel was about a hundred feet of uninfested air. The wind came relentlessly from the south at little less than gale force.
Katapult darted out from behind the stern of the great tanker, shuddering in the force of the wind. As she heeled across the steady blast, her mast top came clear of the stratified bodies and she fitted into the low, clear air. Sails at full stretch, spinnaker billowing in front of her, she rode across the wind at twice the tanker’s speed, leaping down toward Fate. She would reach the platform in two roaring, thundering minutes while those aboard her prayed they could get in behind the terrorists as planned, while their attention was still on Prometheus.
“She’s going to ram us!” yelled Fatima.
“It’s Mariner!” screamed Ben.
“Five minutes,” called Ali from the radar, computing her course and speed.
“Get the others, Fatima. Get them all.”
“But the hostages.”
“All right. Leave two guards. And one in the main control room. Get the rest. Get the guns. Get everything.”
In front of the manager’s office, the deck of the platform stretched forward across an area about the size of a tennis court before it ended in a low rail and an eightyfoot drop to the sea. It was designed as an observation area, nothing more, like the outside bridge-wings on Prometheus. Ben tore open the office door and ran out onto it without further thought. His feet skidded out from under him. His whole side tore agonizingly. He plunged headlong into a writhing, hopping, buzzing mass of insects. Howling with rage, he pulled himself up and stumbled forward to the rail. In an instant, he was alive with locusts. Like a living shroud they clustered round him, piling themselves precariously on his shoulders, even hanging, one layer upon another, down his back. Only his kaffiyah kept them out of his hair and face. Their feet scratched the skin on his hands as they crawled. He could feel the weight of them, caked thickly around him. The humming, buzzing thunder of them was overpowering. The dead, earthy stench of them like vermin droppings. The wind of their wings was more powerful than the south wind in this sheltered place. He skidded to a stop by the rail, lucky not to slither under it, and leaned forward with its crawling crosspiece at his waist. He had to keep shaking the binoculars to keep their slow, fat bodies off the lenses.
And there she was, low in the water. That was what had fooled him at first. Closing at flank speed, her bow coming straight toward him, a bone in her teeth, kicking up a bow wave like a cruiser. Then the blaze of her deck lights with the hellish clouds of locusts dancing there, gathering on her, swarming over her, masking her lines and angles under curves of sandy, writhing, faintly glistening bodies. And her bridge-house. The white of it gone under the carapace of insects. The shape of it swollen, bloated, unwholesome. Only the windows uncovered. And behind the bridge windows, a glimpse of movement.
“I know you, you bastard. You’ve got the con yourself.”
A blow on the shoulder spun him round. He was confronted by a shapeless monster made up of twisting, writhing things. More shapes loomed, amorphous, in the humming gloom beyond.
The sound of hammering started and it took him a moment to realize that one of them was already firing at the ship. The others joined him at the rail, firing wildly. Ben shook his head with frustration — his kaffiyah stayed still and his cheeks moved unsettlingly against it — shooting an AK-47 at the forecastle head of a supertanker was as pointless as throwing stones. They needed their heaviest weapons giving concerted fire at the bridge if they were going to stop Prometheus. He doubted they had more than a couple of weapons powerful enough to do her serious damage at all. But they could kill the men and women aboard: they had more than enough for that.
“One mile. Keep her at that. Due west.”
“It’s bloody difficult to see anything at all. How many of these damn things do you suppose there are?”
“Millions.”
“Right. Remember. I don’t actually want to ram it.”
“Okay.”
“Good. Cutting speed now.” He rang down on the engine room telegraph ALL ASTERN. The automatic equipment began to obey at once. It wouldn’t actually stop them for another five miles at this speed, but stopping wasn’t the real intention.
Suddenly, beyond the dancing brightness of the deck the forecastle head seemed to explode. Richard flinched, dazzled. A column of fire and smoke belched up fiercely from the head of his ship. “Here we go,” he said grimly. “That looked like a mortar round to me.”
“Three-quarters of a mile.”
Katapult lay dead in the water under the southern side of Fate. Her spinnaker was down now and her sails were furled. The aerodynamic column of her mast rocked metronomically in the swell and as it did so, it almost touched the back of the platform. “Now!” yelled Salah, already on Fate, and C. J. Martyr jumped. He seemed to hang in the air for a moment between the masthead and the railings, but then the safe iron slammed into his chest and Salah’s strong hands gripped his shoulders until he scrambled over onto the still, flat metal of the deck. At once he turned, unlooping the rope from his shoulder and dropping its weighted end down to Weary’s waiting hands below. The locust infestation was not as heavy here, but still there was a layer of insects clinging to everything vertical and hopping on anything flat. The two men fought to disregard the almost nauseating sensation caused by the insects crawling on their skin as they went into their carefully planned routine. While Martyr was pulling up the first bundle of weapons from below, Salah scouted forward, checking their route. There seemed to be no guards on this side of the platform at all. Good. Richard’s diversion was working well. Now all they had to do was get the weapons up, find the hostages, and give one to the other.