Dr Asha Higgins had led a varied and exciting life. She had been born the elder of twin girls by less than five minutes, the daughter of a Kuwaiti prince. She had been brought up as a princess in an exclusive English boarding school. She had studied to be a doctor while her sister Fatima studied journalism. She had married and divorced one of Fatima’s friends, the journalist Giles Quartermaine. She had worked for many years as ship’s doctor with the Heritage Mariner organisation and met her second husband, John, when they had been kidnapped with his whole command, pirated by terrorists in the Gulf.
But of all the things she had done and been expected to do during the last five years, this was by far the worst. She clipped on her safety line and heaved herself up out of the pitching little dinghy onto the Jacob’s ladder which swung and flapped up Titan’s massive side. Crossing a viciously choppy sea still foaming from the death of a blazing helicopter and its brave pilot and heaving herself up the better part of twenty metres of sheer black metal counted as nothing. Being called to certify the death of her husband’s closest friend, her own good friend and husband of her own closest friend was a bitter thing indeed. Wally Gough, the ship’s cadet, was there at the top of the ladder to haul Asha aboard and hand her the medical bag which had been pulled aboard separately. ‘Where is he?’ she yelled. And she did have to yell. Up here the wind was very nearly storm force and it was armed with lethal whips of sand. Even though Manhattan was far behind, she could hear the power of the harmattan in the superstructure, the wailing hiss of the sharp Saharan sand, and the massive booming bluster of the gale against the distant icy cliffs.
‘Down here!’ yelled Wally and, although they had told her it was too late, she ran down the deck to Richard’s inert body and the tall Irish first officer — captain now, if they were right about Richard — kneeling by his side. There was quite a crowd of crew men down here as well, all gathered anxiously, protectively, round Richard’s body.
Asha shouldered through them roughly. Watching herself, studying her actions from that distance which shock can engender, she was surprised by the violence of her actions and at the same time recognised it as a reaction to the depth of her personal pain.
Richard was lying on his back, facing up as though fascinated by the low hazy scud of sand clouds. At least his eyes were closed. That was fortunate because the sand was falling out of the wind at an incredible rate and already the long still body was being shrouded in miniature dunes. It was a trick of the wind, however — one which they would soon come to recognise as being typical of its vicious character — that the only part of the deck near the body innocent of sand was in the wind shadow of Richard’s head, where a thick pool of blood lay.
‘Has anyone moved him at all?’ bellowed Asha, thudding painfully onto her knees at his side.
‘Only as far as we needed, in order to check his pulse and perform the standard resuscitation,’ answered Sally. She was pumping powerfully on Richard’s chest. ‘Fifteen,’ she said, apparently apropos of nothing. Then she leaned over and breathed into Richard’s mouth.
Asha began to check for herself while Sally continued to pump Richard’s chest, and her sensitive fingertips warned her that Sally might well be right. To be fair, she would have expected nothing else from a Heritage Mariner first officer — they were all fully trained to be acting medics. A doctor aboard was a luxury normally only granted to Prometheus, John’s usual command, the flagship of the fleet. Deep concentration and sensitive exploration of low-fluttering life forces was almost impossible here in the teeth of this foul, vicious wind, but Asha thought that, deep in the muscle-twined column of the neck, something was stirring in Richard after all. ‘We’re going to have to move him,’ she decided at last. ‘I need a stretcher here. Now!’
A stretcher arrived surprisingly quickly and was slammed down onto the deck beside her as roughly as she had shouldered her way through the circle of onlookers. Sally and she were clearly not the only people aboard who held Richard Mariner in deep affection. But none of the roughness was apparent in the way they gathered Richard’s inert form, folding his arms carefully across the barrel of his chest and cradling his still-bleeding head, and lifted it aboard the sandy stretcher. Equally gently, they strapped him in place and packed pillows round his head and neck.
Six men caught up the stretcher and ran it back up the deck with Asha, Wally and Sally in close pursuit. Skidding over the gathering sand dunes, they swung in through the bulkhead door into the A deck corridor. Still running at a trot, like a squad of marines, they went along the corridor until they reached the door to the ship’s sickbay. Here at last they stopped to let their commander and the doctor through first. Then they, too, entered and laid Richard’s body on the nearest of the beds. They stayed, anxiously, where they were until Asha ordered them out. Sally Bell’s eyebrow, raised when they hesitated, added irresistible weight to the command. Wally went with them, obviously regretfully.
The two women began to unpack Richard’s head and neck with great care. The frame of the stretcher came easily apart and the metal tubes were pulled out of the fabric so that the injured — dead — man was left simply lying on the bed. Then Sally was called up onto the bridge once more, and Asha, desolate, continued on her own.
Richard and she were old friends and she thought she knew every detail about him except those which were absolutely private between him and his wife Robin. She knew what had caused his aquiline nose to be broken slightly out of true. She knew why one of his fingers was shorter than the rest. She thought she knew the bulk of his medical history, but the moment she undid the buttons of his boiler suit and began to expose his upper thorax to the light, she stopped and reached for his medical notes once more. She had several pages to scan quickly, with frowning concentration, before she took the cold disc of her stethoscope and pressed it to the left side of his still chest. It was no wonder, she thought grimly, that his heartbeat was so hard to find. His right lower thorax was ridged with scar tissue. She moved the stethoscope up almost to his armpit, thrusting it mercilessly beneath the solid slab of his pectoral muscle.
She did not clearly hear a heartbeat, but she did hear just the faintest whisper of respiration.
Her long, golden, almond-shaped eyes flooded with tears of relief. She moved across the ravaged wasteland of that great barrel chest and yes, there at last, was a heartbeat. Slow and regular and blessedly strong. Automatically she crossed to her medical bag and began to get out the thermometer, the reflexometer, the blood-pressure gauge and all the other equipment she would need for the battery of tests she wanted to complete now that she knew there was a point in completing them. Then she stopped, turned and crossed to die telephone which hung on the wall by the door. She lifted the handset and dialled.
‘Bridge here,’ came Sally’s unmistakable tones at once.
‘He’s … he’s alive,’ said Asha.
The news of Richard’s near death and current condition went round the little fleet like wildfire after that, and there were few aboard any of the ships who were not cheered to hear that their admiral had survived such a close brush with oblivion.
Four of those who cared least, however, were the forecastle head line watch on Psyche. With the wind blowing so strong and so foul, they had perhaps the least enviable job of all and certainly felt themselves to be the most severely hard done by. The same wind that had whirled Titan’s helicopter to destruction had taken their new makeshift shelter and hurled it in rags and sticks back down the deck, leaving them as exposed as the little pigs in the fairy tale. The drizzling waterfall from the ice cliffs above them intensified at once, gathering the sand in the wind into a foul sludge which covered them and clung. Only at the outer edge of the forecastle head itself could the eternal drizzle be avoided and the men soon retired here to crouch and watch gloomily, their thoughts little short of mutiny, their ears assaulted by the banshee screaming of the wind in the haunted cave throats of the ice.