The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin

them.
    Richard leaped up onto the after-section of the deck and stood there, looking up, his eyes shaded against the glare. It was a harness on a long line. He caught it easily and strapped it around his torso with practiced ease. Then he paused.
    Robin knelt on the bench looking back at him, thinking inconsequentially how romantic he was in his whites, legs spread against Katapult ’s action, shirt collar up, crisp cotton molded to his lean, firm body by the wind, hair tousled wildly by the thundering gale of it. He grinned wolfishly at her—his first smile since the news had come in. He simply couldn’t resist: this was his idea of really good fun. For a moment it had managed to overcome that huge anger she had felt growing in him day by day since Angus had broken the news about her father and their ship. Emotion brought tears to her eyes and when he opened his arms she ran to him thinking only to hug him to her as tightly as possible.
    He said something to her the moment their bodies met but his mouth was full of her hair and it sounded simply like, “Syrup.”
    Syrupy or not, she thought fiercely, I love you, Richard Mariner; and she hugged him until her shoulderjoints popped. There was a click and a sudden pressure in the small of her back.
    “Stand in the stirrup, ” he yelled again, and, an intrepid horsewoman since her youth, she kicked her foot into the dangling metal automatically.
    “Okay!” bellowed Richard, and they swung up and out.
    She glanced down once, understanding, to see Katapult falling, spinning away on the silver, white-webbed sea. Then she buried her face in Richard’s chest and waited to be pulled aboard the helicopter.
    As soon as the harness was unbuckled, Robin was off. She loved helicopters and, while Richard was content with his licenses to drive cars and command ships, Robin also held current licenses to fly small planes and helicopters, too. “Okay if I go on up?” she asked the bemused Navy man who had pulled them aboard. He nodded, still helping Richard with the straps and buckles, but she was already gone to crouch between the pilots’ seats, eyes avidly scanning the instruments and the view.
    The monsoon closed around them at once, buffeting the little craft, causing it to swoop and dance, wrapping it in dazzling mist. Automatically Robin pulled out her sunglasses—a battered pair of flyer’s glasses with silvered mirror lenses—and slipped them on her nose. She didn’t even notice that the pilot and copilot wore identical protection. She crouched between them for all the world as though she really belonged there, a part of the crew herself.
    Unlike Robin, Richard was glad to jump out of the helicopter onto the blustery afterdeck of the Mississippi. The sheer size of the old American warship almost tamed the monsoon seas she was steaming across, but everynow and then a trough would take her head and she would dip and roll, pitch and heave in a corkscrew motion, shouldering off a great hissing glacier of foam. It was quite enough to unsettle some of the nearby sailors, who glanced almost enviously at the rock-steady progress of the nearby tankers, but not enough to complicate the landing or to slow the Mariners as they ran after their escort up toward the steel-gray mountain of the bridge-house.
    Admiral Walter Stark received them in his office. The three of them had first met five years ago in Cannes where his California-class cruiser Baton Rouge, then part of the Mediterranean fleet, had been welcoming visitors aboard. But they had known each other for much longer—ever since Bob Stark, his favorite nephew and godson, had joined the Heritage Mariner fleet as an engineer.
    “Robin. Richard.” He rose and strode toward them from behind his tidily piled desk as soon as they came through the door. “This is a bad business in every way!” His square, craggy face was lined with concern. His intelligent, deep-set brown eyes full of sympathy. He had known Sir William Heritage