The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin Page A

never did in public and she sounded confused even in her own ears. Had her vexation taken her too far? Was he really angry with her?
    She found herself embarrassed and unaccountably close to tears. She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes as though brushing sweat away, and looked back toward the lifeboat, disguising her momentary weakness, even from herself.
    Katapult lurched. Automatically she held on to the cockpit’s coaming, her left hand reaching out for Richard’s shoulder. The white, oil-blotched hulk of the lifeboat was still half a mile distant, but Katapult seemed to be picking up speed extremely quickly. There was a sudden series of clicks as the computer was forced to reset the outriggers and trim the sails, the clear mechanical sounds making it shockingly obvious just how much the noise of the wind and sea had grown in the last few minutes. Instinctively she tightened her grip on the thick, hard triangle of muscle behind his collarbone. Katapult lurched again and this time she felt something—a slap of wind on her cheek. The trimaran gathered even more way as though she were a racing car with the turbo kicking in. She heard the wheel slap into the palms of his hands and she felt his whole body tense. “God, Robin, she’s pulling hard. There’s something…”
    “What is it?”
    “Damned if I know. Aach …” He made a peculiarly Scottish sound of disgust, left over from his Edinburgh schooldays, and put the wheel right over, taking the way off her. The sail motors automatically gathered the sails in. Katapult ’s mast leaped upright and they staggered into each other’s arms as the deck came level—surprised by how much heel there had been on her. As her speed decreased, so the wind seemed to pick up even more. “It’s probably nothing,” he said softly as he let her go. “Maybe a squall coming. I don’t know…”
    Robin glanced away from the lifeboat and looked around carefully, but the depressing haze swirled round Katapult, almost willfully concealing everything. It was impossible to make out any cloud formations or see the telltale darkening of air and sea that foreshadowed changing weather. She glanced down into the black bowl of the dead radar—along with the radio and the masthead it was another casualty of the explosion.
    The unusual movement of the air stopped.
    Richard turned away and reached down to push the start button of the engine. Robin directed her gaze back to the lifeboat. Something was very wrong. Perhaps distance had disguised it. Certainly that errant freak of wind and the swirling haze had camouflaged it. But when one looked carefully, it was obvious that the boat was not sitting correctly in the water. It was angled up and away almost as if it were willfully trying to hide something from them.
    Richard pushed the starter button, the engine coughed into life. Katapult began to slide forward again uneasily over the choppy water in that slightly ungainly fashion she had if anything other than the wind impelled her.
    Without any good reason, Robin suddenly felt reluctant to get any closer to the lifeboat. She swung round toward Richard, half expecting him to be sharing her foreboding, but he was concentrating absolutely on guiding Katapult across the wind. He was half in love with the sleek vessel and worried about soiling one square inch of her dazzling white hull with the black taint of the dead ship’s lifeblood. The lifeboat was at the outer edge of the oil-slick and clearly Richard wanted to follow its track round, keeping clear of the oil, bringing only Katapult ’s nose alongside the stricken boat. Someone would have to be out there on the farthest point of the bow to grab hold of the boat and secure it to Katapult.
    The thought of being out there, so near the boat and so far from the others, frightened her. In near panic, she found herself halfway to the stairs leading down to Weary and Hood. And yet it was that very fear that stopped her. She knew fear of