Jack Higgins – Sheba

He nodded. ‘I’m a deep-sea fisherman out of Bahrein. Got caught in a storm and ran out of fuel. It’s lucky the Kantara came along.’

‘I suppose it is,’ she said.

Her perfume hung disturbingly in the air and, for some reason, he could think of nothing more to say. And then Piroo hailed him from the launch and he smiled. Til have to be going.’

‘Ships that pass in the night,’ she said.

He went down the ladder quickly and Piroo cast off the line. The Kantara pulled away from them at once and, when he looked up, he could see the woman in the yellow glare of the deck lights, leaning over the rail watching them until they faded into the night.

He dismissed her from his mind for the moment, because there were more important things to think of. The two-gallon oil can stood on the deck where Piroo had left it. Kane checked it quickly and then went below to the saloon.

Piroo had the air tank ready, and Kane stripped to his shorts and the Hindu helped him on with it. They went up on deck. Piroo vanished into the wheelhouse and emerged with a large, powerful spot-lamp on a long cable, specially designed for underwater use, which plugged into the boat’s lighting system.

A ring bolt had been welded to each end of the oil can, and Piroo threaded a manilla rope through them as Kane pulled on his diving mask and gripped the mouthpiece of his breathing tube firmly between his teeth. He took the lamp in one hand and vaulted over the side.

For a moment, he paused to adjust the flow of oxygen and then he swam down in a long, sweeping curve that brought him underneath the hull.

The sensation of being alone in a silent world, of floating in space, was somehow accentuated by the circumstances. The water gleamed with a sort of phosphorescent fire all around him, and transparent fish, attracted by the lamp, glowed in its light.

After a moment, the oil can dropped down through the water. He grabbed the manilla rope with one hand and quickly passed it through two more ring bolts set in the keel of the launch.

He turned from securing it and paused, held by the wonder of the scene. The sea seemed alive with fish, incandescent, glowing like candles in its depths. A school of barracuda flashed by like silver streaks, and then an eight-foot shark swung into the beam of the lamp and poised there, watching him.

As it moved forward, he pulled his breathing tube from his mouth, emitting a stream of silvery bubbles. The shark altered course with a flick of its tail and disappeared into the gloom.

He swam up to the surface quickly and Piroo pulled him up over the low rail. ‘Everything all right, Sahib?’

Kane nodded as he unstrapped the tank. ‘No trouble at all. One shark, and he was only trying to be playful.’

The Hindu grinned, teeth flashing in the darkness, and handed him a towel, and Kane went below. The water had been surprisingly cold, and he rubbed himself down briskly and then dressed.

When he went back on deck, the wind was freshening and Piroo brought him more coffee. As he drank it, Kane caught a last glimpse of the Kantara’s navigation lights on the horizon, and remembered the woman.

She had certainly been attractive and he wondered what she was doing on an old tub like the Kantara. There could be no satisfactory answer, of course.

For a moment, he seemed to catch a faint touch of her perfume on the night air. He smiled wryly and, going into the wheelhouse, started the engines and took the launch forward into the night.

FOUR

THEY CAME INTO BAHREIN in the early afternoon. As the launch rounded the curved promontory crowded with its white houses, a two-masted dhow, lateen sails bellying in the Gulf breeze, moved out of harbour on the long haul across the Arabian Sea to India.

The Kantara was unloading at the jetty. On the white curve of the beach, fishermen sat patiently mending their nets and a few children played naked in the shallows.

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