Read Online The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin - Free Book Online Page A

could do efficiently or quickly. And the need for speed was suddenly impressed on him. The stern-most of the upright figures seemed suddenly to move. Richard looked up, shocked out of his meditation, in time to see a battered cap fly off the figure’s frozen head and spin away, carried by the same eerie wind through which the ripples were running and the oily spume was beginning to fly.
    Whatever was happening, whatever squall was coming down on them, he would awaken the others only when he was ready to get Katapult under way. Either he looked in the lifeboat now or nobody would ever lookin it. He had hesitated for less than a second and he moved.
    Even as he stepped down into the floating charnel house of the lifeboat, one thing became obvious—this boat had also been strafed. Strafed from wave-top level. The scene came vividly alive in his mind’s eye: the huddle of men trying to pull their shipmates aboard, the bullets going among them, the remorseless sharks coming. His face expressionless, Richard secured a line to Katapult ’s low rail and began to check more carefully. There were no documents, no radio or navigation equipment in sight. But the corpses were clustered—piled—in the bottom of the lifeboat, their arms reaching upward like the tentacles of sea anemones, seeming to wave in the rising wind. If he wanted to check further and get at any of the lockers, he would have to undertake the grim business of moving them.
    The most obvious place to start was at the stern, where the fewest corpses and the largest lockers were. He began to move down the boat and found his attention caught not by the corpses but by Robin, toward whom he was moving. The sight of her called to him and he made his way toward her carefully. At the stern, he paused, holding the lower end of the boathook and looking up along its length at the beloved figure standing mere feet away tense and strong, her eyes closed, her face blank. A feeling of love and pride overwhelmed him and, had she not been beyond his reach he would have held her tightly to him.
    Then something forced his eyes to look past her, downwind, to the place toward which the haze and spray were rushing. In that instant, the mist was plucked away.
    And the monster was revealed.
    “Oh, my God!”
    He shook the boathook and she jumped awake. “Robin! Get below! Get Weary and Hood. Now! ”
    Jesus! How could he not have known? How could he not even have suspected? The wind, the mist, the spume, everything, not blown but sucked. Sucked into the roaring, thunderous gyre of it. Sucked to whatever eternity awaited at the other end of it.
    Robin dropped the boathook on the cockpit sole and started to run below—when she caught her first glimpse of its broad white shoulder whipping into its flat black cloud-base head. With wondering eyes she traced the sinuous, sinister curve of it down, down inexorably to the broad foot, wreathed in madly dancing spray. And suddenly she became aware of just how solid the air felt streaming so rapidly past her; and how swiftly and forcefully it was taking Katapult along with it.
    “Dear God!” she breathed and hit the cabin door.
    It was dark and hot, quiet and still—a numbing contrast to the increasing bedlam above. Once through the door she had to force herself to further motion. An outrageous idea came that she could just curl up down here with the men she had come to fetch, pull the blankets safely over her head, and hide…
    She hit the light switch.
    Both men had collapsed on the long bench-seats on either side of the central table without even bothering to open out the bunks. Neither one stirred at the sudden brightness; they were insulated by exhaustion from light as well as from the ungainly motion of the yacht and the growing din of the wind. Weary was closest. Without further thought, she ran across to him on suddenly unsteady feet.
    He was lying, fully dressed, on his back with his arms crossed on his chest, laid out like a dead man.