He glanced down, surprised by the weight of the Heckler and Koch MP-5, and found it was completely hidden in an amorphous mass of insects reaching down in a club from his elbow. His skin crawled, as though the foul things were inside him as well as out.
Martyr pulled up the first bundle of weapons and dropped the line for the second. So far, so good, he thought.
The manager’s office had a flat roof that overlooked the observation platform where the mortar was. Up here, at an elevation slightly higher than the bridge windows that were its target, Ben put the general-purpose machine gun. It was the heaviest piece he had here apart from the mortar, but that only had four rounds left and it wasn’t big enough to be accurate down the length of the tanker’s deck. One lucky hit on the forecastle head had been enough to set it on fire, but the tanker was still powering toward them, chopping through the curtains of dancing insects. The blazing bows were a quarter of a mile away at most, halfway between here and the bridge. “Fire!” yelled Ben. He was so preoccupied, he spoke in English, but the meaning was clear enough. A bright line of 7.65mm tracer arced out toward the bridge-house less than half a mile away.
“One minute to impact,” sang out John.
Richard was already spinning the helm, able to see the platform quite clearly now, and able to judge things for himself.
He moved the engine-room telegraph from FULL ASTERN to STOP.
It had never been his plan to ram the rig. That would have been far too dangerous for all concerned. The mathematics were something he must work out when he had leisure, but the force that would be released by the impact of a quarter of a million tons of water moving at twenty knots, with all its attendant momentum, against one immovable object like the platform would be colossal. It would certainly be enough to destroy Fate and all upon it. And probably the tanker too: her steel sides would be split apart like tissue paper.
Having taken the attention of the terrorists and held it while Katapult crept in, it was now his job to graze his ship gently along the platform’s side and try to do some damage with the overhanging bridge-wings.
“Thirty seconds!” called John.
The center of the deck between the Sampson posts erupted like a volcano and Richard, who had decided the mortar had ceased firing, jerked right back in shock. The movement saved his life, for just at that moment, the bridge windows exploded inward, and he was overwhelmed by tracer bullets, shards of glass, and whirring, panicked insects.
The tanker’s blazing forecastle head began to swing away. Fatima, crouching beside the mortar team, clapped her hands with relief, sending up a cloud of crippled insects. “Well done,” she yelled in raucous Arabic. “It’s time to try one more.”
Above her head the long hose of tracer reached out toward the bridge. As it moved in a lazy snake of light, so it cleared the air around it and the mortar was inundated with smoldering pieces of locust. But the air was clearing anyway: miraculously, it looked as though the whole swarm had settled on the tanker, seemingly forcing it down more deeply into the water by the weight of their deep-piled bodies. It was as though she had come through some living sandstorm, with great dunes piled high on her decks. Dunes whose every grain was a locust. “Let’s put one right in the middle. Now!” she ordered. The round rattled down the tube and thumped onto the firing pin. They leaned back as the explosive lobbed it over the heads of the rest of the men, still firing their assault rifles from the railing in front.
The middle of the tanker’s deck burst open. The front of the bridge-house seemed to shiver as though a hurricane wind swept across it.
Prometheus’s burning forecastle head began to swing back in.
The bridge was a shambles. The equipment at the front was in ruins from the combination of blast and tracer fire. The helm was in splinters. The only piece of equipment still functioning seemed to be the collision alarm radar, which was shrieking out its most urgent warning. There was glass everywhere littering the floor, the work surfaces, the chairs. Smoking tracer rounds, still red hot, lay on the deck. The radio was a total wreck. And everything was covered with locusts, most of them dying or dead.
Richard, on one knee, looking around the wreckage, softly called out, “John?”
“Behind the chart table. Fifteen seconds to impact, I’d say.”
“I can’t control her anymore. They’ve destroyed the helm.”
“You mean, we’re actually going to ram Fate?”
“Looks like it.”
“Good God.”
Ben reckoned they had about ten seconds before the tanker hit. He looked down over the edge of the roof he was kneeling on. Fatima was already clearing the observation platform down there. Good. Up here he had four men, all lying belly down. Three of them were firing their relatively useless assault rifles at the bridge; the fourth had the exceedingly effective generalpurpose machine gun. “Stay here as long as you can,” he ordered. “Keep firing at the bridge.” As he stood up, the bow of the supertanker, still belching a column of flame, came level with the edge of Fate. The whole platform began to shake and a deep bass note, so low and powerful it made his eyeballs tremble in their sockets, seemed to come from every plate of it. “Now it really begins,” said Ben to himself and ran to the steps that would take him down to the deck. He was on his way to the main command post in the central buildings.
Prometheus’s flank ground along Fate’s great metal legs. The observation platform slowly bent upward as its edge caught the tanker’s deck railing. Then it folded back and tore away altogether. Beyond it, the second column of fire rose from the tanker’s deck, guttering now as the mortar bomb dissipated its force in the water in her hold. A protruding beam of metal caught on the nearest Sampson post. Fate seemed to stagger round. The whole manager’s office shook, threatening to tumble free.
It was at this point that Ben’s men stopped firing at the bridge and retreated, follow-my-leader. Thirty seconds after they had gone, the scythe of the starboard bridge-wing, ten feet wider than the ship, crushed into the shuddering platform, destroying what little was left there before it ground to a juddering halt.
The second that it did so, Richard’s long body dropped down from its after edge onto Fate, and rolled into the shadows of the wreckage.
Christine stood at the base of Katapult’s mast, looking upward. The last bundle of arms and grenades destined for the hostages had gone. Salah and her father were waiting at the platform’s edge for Doc to climb up to them. He went up the swaying mast like a monkey, then paused at the top to look down at her. He waved. The mast swung. He leaped.
And the whole platform began to jump and shake. The two men on it fell to their knees as she watched in horror. Doc, flying toward it, never stood a chance. He hit it but he could not hold it. Chris watched, riven, as his body bounced back off it and began to fall. Then she, too, was in motion, running down the hull’s length, some half thought of catching him in her mind. But he fell free. Into the water, just in front of the sleek bow of his creation. She was there, reaching down, pulling him aboard the instant he came to the surface. But it was not until he was on the deck that she noticed his headband was gone.