The Fire Ship

Summer 1990 in the Persian Gulf: A small band of unidentified Arabs hijacks Prometheus II , flagship supertanker of the Heritage Mariner oiler fleet. Sir William Heritage flies from London to Bahrain and is immediately kidnapped. His daughter Robin and son-in-law Richard Mariner are on the Indian Ocean aboard the experimental multihull ship Kat a pult when they and Katapult' s two inventors, an Australian and an American, come upon an abandoned, smoking tanker that has been attacked by aircraft. Although the object of many frights and speculations, the fire ship never figures in the story, which follows this small group, eventually expanding to include three more Americans and an Arab, as they wrest Prometheus from the terrorists. But after finding the tanker without the hostages or villains, the rescuers continue on, in a bloody finale, to rescue the crew members, who are held on an abandoned oil rig at the mouth of the Gulf. The book teems with cheap cliff-hangers (the ``hand that grasped at his leg'' belongs to a corpse that ``had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard's clothing''), amazing coincidences (the villain is Richard's godson, who is paid by the father of the villain's unknowing top aide, who is twin to Prometheus 's medic) and an incredible absence of references to Iraq in August 1990. Nevertheless, Tonkin's ( The Coffin Ship ) latest has explosive movie potential and is likely to sell very well. (May)