Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers Read online

  Nick went head down, finning desperately to catch the swirling body which tumbled like a leaf in high wind. He had a fleeting glimpse of Baker's face, contorted with terror and lack of breath, the glass visor of his helmet already swamping with icy water as the pressure spurted through the non-return valve. The Chief's headset microphone squealed once and then went dead as the water shorted it out.

  ‘Drop your belt,’ yelled Nick, but Baker did not respond; he had not heard, his headset had gone and instead he fought ineffectually in the swirling current, drawn inexorably down to brutal death.

  Nick got a hand to him and threw back with all his strength on his fins to check their downward plunge, but still they went down and Nick's right hand was clumsy with cold and the double thickness of his mittens as he groped for the quick-release on the Chief's belt.

  He hit the rounded bottom of the great hull with his shoulder, and felt them dragged under to where clouds of sediment blew like smoke from the working of the keel. Locked together like a couple of waltzing dancers, they swung around and he saw the keel, like the blade of a guillotine, rise up high above them. He could not reach the Chief's release toggle.

  There were only micro-seconds in which to go for his one other chance. He hit his own release and the thick belt with thirty-five pounds of lead fell away from Nick's waist; with it went the buddy line that would guide them back to the waiting Zodiac, for it had been clipped into the back of the belt.

  The abrupt loss of weight checked their downward plunge, and fighting with all the strength of his legs, Nick was just able to hold them clear of the great keel as it came swinging downwards.

  Within ten feet of them, steel struck stone with a force that rang in Nick's eardrum like a bronze gong but he had an armlock on the Chief's struggling body, and now at last his right hand found the release toggle on the other man's belt.

  He hit it, and another thirty-five pounds of lead dropped away. They began to rise, up along the hogging steel hull, faster and faster as the oxygen in Nick's bag expanded with the release of pressure. Now their plight was every bit as desperate, for they were racing upwards to a roof of solid ice with enough speed to break bone or crack a skull.

  Nick emptied his lungs, exhaling on a single continuous breath, and at the same time opened the valve to vent his bag, blowing away the precious life-giving gas in an attempt to check their rise - yet still they went into the ice with a force that would have stunned them both, had Nick not twisted over and caught it on his shoulder and outflung arm. They were pinned there under the ice by the cork-like buoyancy of their rubber suits and the remaining gas in Nick's bag.

  With mild and detached surprise Nick saw that the lower side of the ice pack was not a smooth sheet, but was worked into ridges and pinnacles, into weird flowing shapes like some abstract sculpture in pale green glass. It was only a fleeting moment that he looked at it, for beside him Baker was drowning.

  His helmet was flooded with icy water and his face was empurpled and his mouth contorted into a horrible rictus; already his movements were becoming spasmodic and uncoordinated, as he struggled for breath.

  Nick realized that haste would kill them both now. He had to work fast but deliberately - and he held Baker to him as he cracked the valve on his steel oxygen bottle, reinflating his chest bag.

  With his right hand, he began to unscrew the breathing pipe connection into the side of Baker's helmet. It was slow, too slow. He needed touch for this delicate work.

  He thought, This could cost me my right hand, and he stripped off the thick mitten in a single angry gesture. Now he could feel - for the few seconds until the cold paralysed his fingers. The connection came free and while he worked, Nick was pumping his lungs like a bellows, hyperventilating, washing his blood with pure oxygen until he felt light-headed and dizzy.

  One last sweet breath, and then he unscrewed his own hose connection; icy water flooded through the valve but he held his head at an angle to trap oxygen in the top of his helmet, keeping his nose and eyes clear, and he rescrewed his own hose into Baker's helmet with fingers that no longer had feeling.

  He held the Chief's body close to his chest, embracing like lovers, and he cracked the last of the oxygen from his bottle. There was just sufficient pressure of gas left to expunge the water from Baker's helmet. It blew out with an explosive hiss through the valve, and Nick watched carefully with his face only inches from Baker's.

  The Chief was choking and coughing, gulping and gasping at the rush of cold oxygen, his eyes watery and unseeing, his spectacles blown awry and the lenses obscured by sea water, but then Nick felt his chest begin to swell and subside. Baker was breathing again, ‘which is more than I am doing’ Nick thought grimly - and then suddenly he realized for the first time that he had lost the guide line with his weight belt.

  He did not know in which direction was the shore, nor which way to swim to reach the Zodiac. He was utterly disorientated, and desperately he peered through his half flooded visor for sight of the Golden Adventurer's hull to align himself. She was not there, gone in the misty green gloom - and he felt the first heave of his lungs as they demanded air. And as he denied his body the driving need to breathe, he felt the fear that had flickered deep within him flare up into true terror, swiftly becoming cold driving panic.

  A suicidal urge to tear at the green ice roof of this watery tomb almost overwhelmed him. He wanted to try and rip his way through it with bare freezing hands to reach the precious air.

  Then, just before panic completely obliterated his reason, he remembered the compass on his wrist. Even then his brain was sluggish, beginning to starve for oxygen, and it took precious seconds working out the reciprocal of his original bearing.

  As he leaned forward to read the compass, more sea water spurted into his helmet, spiking needles of icy cold agony into the sinuses of his cheeks and forehead, making the teeth ache in his jaws, so he gasped involuntarily and immediately choked.

  Still holding Baker to him, linked by the thick black umbilical cord of his oxygen hose, Nick began to swim out on the reciprocal compass heading. Immediately his lungs began to pump, convulsing in involuntary spasms, like those of childbirth, craving air, and he swam on.

  With his head thrown back slightly he saw that the sheet of ice moved slowly above him; at times, when the current held them it moved not at all, and it required all his self-control to keep finning doggedly, then the current relaxed its grip and they moved forward again, but achingly slowly.

  He had time then to realize how exquisitely beautiful was the ice roof; translucent, wonderously carved and sculptured - and suddenly he remembered standing hand in hand with Chantelle beneath the arched roof of the Chartres cathedral, staring up in awe. The pain in his chest subsided, the need to breathe passed, but he did not recognize that as the sign of mortal danger, nor the images that formed before his eyes as the fantasy of a brain deprived of oxygen and slowly dying.

  Chantelle's face was before him then, glowing hair soft and thick and glossy as a butterfly's wing, huge dark eyes and that wide mouth so full of the promise of delight and warmth and love.

  ‘I loved you,’ he thought. ‘I really loved you.’

  And again the image changed. He saw again the incredible slippery explosive liquid burst with which his son was born, heard that querulous cry as he dangled pink and wet and hairless from the rubber-gloved hand, and felt again the soul-consuming wonder and joy.

  ‘A drowning man –‘ Nick recognized at last what was happening to him. He knew then he was dying, but the panic had passed, as the cold had passed also, and the terror. He swam on, dreamlike, into the green mists. Then he realized that his own legs were no longer moving; he lay relaxed not breathing, not feeling, and it was Baker's body that was thrusting and working against him.

  Nick peered into the glass visor still only inches from his eyes, and he saw that Baker's face was set and determined. He was gulping the pure sweet oxygen and gained strength with each breath, driving on strong
ly.

  ‘You beauty,’ whispered Nick dreamily, and felt the water shoot into his throat, but there was no pain.

  Another image formed before him, an Arrowhead-class yacht with spinnaker set, running free across a bright Mediterranean sea, and his son at the tiller, the dense tumble of curls that covered his small neat head fluttering in the wind, and the same velvety dark eyes as his mother's in the sun-tanned oval of his face as he laughed.

  ‘Don't let her run by the lee, Peter,’ Nicholas wanted to shout to his son, but the image faded into blackness. He thought for a moment that he had passed into unconsciousness, but then he realized suddenly that it was the black rubber bottom of the Zodiac only inches from his eyes, and that the rough hands that dragged him upwards, lifting him and tearing loose the fastening of his helmet, were not part of the fantasy.

  Propped against the pillowed gunwale of the Zodiac, held by the two boatmen from falling backwards, the first breaths of sub-zero air were too rich for his starved lungs, and Nick coughed and vomited weakly down the front of his suit.

  Nick came out of the shower cabinet. The cabin was thick with steam, and his body glowed dull angry red from the almost boiling water. He wrapped the towel around his waist as he stepped through into his night cabin.

  Baker slouched in the armchair at the foot of his bunk. He wore fresh overalls, his hair stood up in little damp spikes around the shaven spot where Angel's cat-gut stitches still held the scabbed wound closed. One of the side frames of his spectacles had snapped during those desperate minutes below Golden Adventurer's stern, and Baker had repaired it with black insulating tape.

  He held two glasses in his left hand, and, a big flat brown bottle of liquor in the other. He poured two heavy slugs into the glasses as Nick paused in the bathroom door, and the sweet, rich aroma smelled like the sugar-cane fields of northern Queensland.

  Baker passed a glass to Nick, and then showed him the bottle's yellow label.

  ‘Bundaberg rum,’ he announced, the dinky die stuff, sport!

  Nick recognized both the offer of liquor and the salutation as probably the highest accolade the chief would ever give another human being. Nick sniffed the dark honey-brown liquor and then took it in a single toss, swirled it once around his mouth, swallowed, shuddered like a spaniel shaking off water droplets, exhaled and said: ‘It's still the finest rum in the world.’ Dutifully, he said what was expected of him, and held out his glass.

  ‘The Mate asked me to give you a message,’ said Baker as he poured another shot for each of them. ‘Glass hit 1035 and now it‘s diving like a dingo into its hole - back to 1020 already. It's going to blow - is it ever going to blow!’

  They regarded each other over the rims of the glasses.

  ‘We've wasted almost two hours, Beauty,’ Nick told him, and Baker blinked at the unlikely name, then grinned crookedly as he accepted it.

  ‘How are you going to plug that hull?’

  ‘I've got ten men at work already. We are going to fother a sail into a collision mat.’ Baker blinked again, then shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘That's Hornblower stuff-‘

  ‘The Witch of Endor,’ Nick agreed. ‘So you can read?’

  ‘You haven't got pressure to drive it home,’ Baker objected. The trapped air from the engine room will blow it out.’

  ‘I'm going to run a wire down the ventilation shaft of the engine room and out through the gash. We'll fix the collision mat outside the hull and winch it home with the wire.’

  Baker stared at him for five seconds while he examined the proposition. A sail was fothered by threading the thick canvas with thousands of strands of unravelled oakum until it resembled a huge shaggy doormat. When this was placed over an aperture below a ship's waterline, the pressure of water forced it into the hole, and the water swelled the mass of fibre until it formed an almost watertight plug.

  However, in Golden Adventurer's case the damage was extensive and as the hull was already flooded, there was no pressure differential to drive home the plug. Nick proposed to beat that by using an internal wire to haul the plug into the gash.

  ‘It might work.’ Beauty Baker was noncommittal.

  Nick took the second rum at a gulp, dropped the towel and reached for his working gear laid out on the bunk.

  ‘Let's get power on her before the blow hits us,’ he suggested mildly, and Baker lumbered to his feet and stuffed the Bundaberg bottle into his back pocket.

  ‘Listen, sport,’ he said. ‘All that guff about you being a Pommy, don't take it too seriously.’

  ‘I won't,’ said Nick. ‘Actually, I was born and educated in Blighty, but my father's an American. So that makes me one also.

  ‘Christ.’ Beauty hitched disgustedly at his waist with both elbows. ‘If there's anything worse than a bloody Pom, it's a goddamned Yank.’

  Now that Nick was certain that the bottom of the bay was clean and free of underwater snags, he handled Warlock boldly but with a delicately skilful touch which David Allen watched with awe.

  Like a fighting cock, the Warlock attacked the thicker ice line along the shore, smashing free huge lumps and slabs, then washing them clear with the propellers, giving herself space to work about Golden Adventurer's stern.

  The ominous calm of both sea and air made the work easier, although the vicious little current working below Adventurer's stern complicated the transfer of the big alternator.

  Nick had two Yokohama fenders slung from Warlocks side, and the bloated plastic balloons cushioned the contact of steel against steel as Nick laid Warlock alongside the stranded liner, holding her there with delicate adjustments of power and rudder and screw pitch.

  Beauty Baker and his working party, swaddled in heavy Antarctic gear, were already up on the catwalk of Warlock's forward gantry, seventy feet above the bridge and overlooking Adventurer's sharply canted deck.

  As Nick nudged Warlock in, they dropped the steel boarding-ladder across the gap between the two ships and Beauty led them across in single file, like a troop of monkeys across the limb of a forest tree.

  ‘All across,’ the Third Officer confirmed for Nick, and then added, ‘Glass has dropped again, sir. Down to 1005.’

  ‘Very well,’ Nick drew Warlock gently away from the liner's stern, and held her fifty feet off. Only then did he flick his eyes up at the sky. The midnight sun had turned into a malevolent jaundiced yellow, while the sun itself was a ball of dark satanic red above the peaks of Cape Alarm, and it seemed that the snowfields and glaciers were washed with blood.

  ‘It's beautiful.’ Suddenly the girl was beside him. The top of her head was on a level with his shoulder, and in the ruddy light, her thick roped hair glowed like newly minted sovereigns in red gold. Her voice was low and a little husky with shyness, and touched a chord of response in Nick, but when she lifted her face to him he saw how young she was.

  ‘I came to thank you,’ she said softly. ‘It's the first chance I've had.’

  She wore baggy, borrowed men's clothing that made her look like a little girl dressing up, and her face, free of cosmetics, had that waxy plastic glow of youth, like the polished skin of a ripe apple.

  Her expression was solemn and there were traces of her recent ordeal beneath her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Nick sensed the tension and nervousness in her.

  ‘Angel wouldn't let me come before,’ she said, and suddenly she smiled. The nervousness vanished and it was the direct warm unselfconscious smile of a beautiful child that has never known rejection. Nick was shocked by the strength of his sudden physical desire for her, his body moved, clenching like a fist in his groin, and he felt his heart pound furiously in the cage of his ribs.

  His shock turned to anger, for she looked but fourteen or fifteen years of age; almost she seemed as young as his own son, and he was shamed by the perversity of his attraction. since the good bright times with Chantelle, he had not experienced such direct and instant involvement with a woman. At the thought of Chantelle, his emotions co
llapsed in a disordered tangle, from which only his lust and his anger emerged clearly.

  He cupped the anger to him, like a match in a high wind, it gave him strength again. Strength to thrust this aside, for he knew how vulnerable he still was and how dangerous a course had opened before him, to be led by this child woman. Suddenly he was aware that he had swayed bodily towards the girl and had been staring into her face for many long seconds, that she was meeting his gaze steadily and that something was beginning to move in her eyes like cloud shadow across the sunlit surface of a green mountain lake. Something was happening which he could not afford, could not chance - and then he realized also that the two young deck officers were watching them with undisguised curiosity, and he turned his anger on her.

  ‘Young lady,’ he said. ‘You have an absolute genius for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ And his tone was colder and more remote than even he had intended it.

  Before he turned away from her, he saw the moment of her disbelief turn to chagrin, and the green eyes misted slightly. He stood stiffly staring down the fore-deck where David Allen's team was opening the forward salvage hold.

  Nick's anger evaporated almost at once, to be replaced by dismay. He realized clearly that he had completely alienated the girl and he wanted to turn back to her and say something gracious that might retrieve the situation, but he could think of nothing and instead lifted the hand microphone to his lips and spoke to Baker over the VFH radio.

  ‘How's it going, Chief?’

  There were ten seconds of delay, and Nick was very conscious of the girl's presence near him.

  ‘Their emergency generator has burned out, it will need two days’ work to get it running again. We'll have to take on the alternator,’ Beauty told him.

  ‘We are ready to give it to you,’ Nick told him, and then called David Allen on the fore-deck.

  ‘Ready, David?’

  ‘All set.’ Nick began edging Warlock back towards the liner's towering stern, and now at last he turned back to the girl. Unaccountably, he now wanted her approbation, so his smile was ready - but she had already gone, taking with her that special aura of brightness.