Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers Page 15

  ‘Chief,’ Nick called the ship. ‘What's your discharge rate?’

  ‘We are moving nigh on five hundred thousand gallons an hour.

  ‘Call me as soon as she alters her trim!’ he said, and then glanced up at the pointer of the anemometer above the control panel. The wind force was riding eight now, but he had to blink his stinging swollen eyes to read the scale.

  ‘David,’ he said, and he could hear the hoarseness in his voice, the flat dead tone. ‘It will be four hours before she will be light enough to make an attempt to haul her off, but I want you to put the main towing-cable on board her and make fast, so we will be ready when she is.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Use a rocket-line,’ said Nick, and then stood dumbly, trying to think of the other orders he must give, but his brain was blank.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ David asked with quick concern, and immediately Nick felt the prick of annoyance. He had never wanted sympathy in his life, and he found his voice again. But he stopped the sharp words that came so quickly to his lips.

  ‘You know what to do, David. I won't give you any other advice.’ He turned like a drunkard towards his quarters. ‘Call me when you've done it, or if Baker reports alteration of trim - or if anything else changes, anything, anything at all, you understand.’ He made it to the cabin before his knees buckled and he dropped his terry robe as he toppled backwards on to his bunk.

  At 60o south latitude, there runs the only sea-lane that circumnavigates the entire globe, unbroken by any land mass. This wide girdle of open water runs south of Cape Horn and Australasia and the Cape of Good Hope, and it has the fearsome reputation of breeding the wildest weather on earth. It is the meeting-ground of two vast air masses, the cold slumping Antarctic air, and the warmer, more buoyant airs of the sub-tropics. These are flung together by the centrifugal forces generated by the earth as it revolves on its own axis, and their movement is further complicated by the enormous torque of the coriolis force. As they strike each other, the opposing air masses split into smaller fragments that retain their individual characteristics. They begin to revolve upon themselves, gigantic whirlpools of tortured air, and as they advance, so they gain in strength and power and velocity.

  The high-pressure system which had brought that ominously calm and silken weather to Cape Alarm, had bounced the pressure right up to 1035 millibars, while the great depression which pursued it so closely and swiftly had a centre pressure as low as 985 millibars. Such a sharp contrast meant that the winds along the pressure-gradient were ferocious.

  The depression itself was almost fifteen hundred miles across its circumference, and it reached up to the high troposphere, thirty thousand feet above the level of the sea. The mighty winds it contained reached right off the maximum of the Beaufort scale of force twelve, gusting 120 miles an hour and more. They roared unfettered upon a terrible sea, unchecked by the bulwark of any land mass, nothing in their path, but the sudden jagged barrier of Cape Alarm.

  While Nicholas Berg slept the deathlike sleep of utter exhaustion, and Beauty Baker tended his machines, driving them to their limits in an effort to pump Golden Adventurer free of her burden of salt water, the storm rushed down upon them.

  When her knock was unanswered, Samantha stood uncertainly, balancing the heavy tray against the Warlock's extravagant action as she rode the rising swells at the entrance to the bay.

  Her uncertainty lasted not more than three seconds, for she was a lady given to swift decisions. She tried the door-latch and when it turned, she pushed it open slowly enough to warn anybody on the far side, and stepped into the Captain's day cabin.

  ‘He ordered food,’ she justified her intrusion, and closed the door behind her, glancing swiftly around the empty cabin. It had been furnished in the high style of the old White Star liners. Real rosewood panelling and the couch and chairs were in rich brown calf hide, polished and buttoned, while the deck was carpeted in thick shaggy wool, the colour of tropical forest leaves.

  Samantha placed the tray on the table that ran below the starboard portholes, and she called softly. There was no reply, and she stepped to the open doorway into the night cabin.

  A white terry robe lay in a heap in the centre of the deck, and she thought for one disturbing moment that the body on the bed was naked, but then she saw he wore a thin pair of white silk boxer shorts.

  ‘Captain Berg,’ she called again, but softly enough not to disturb him, and with a completely feminine gesture picked up the robe from the floor, folded it and dropped it over a chair, moving forward at the same time until she stood beside his bunk.

  She felt a quick flare of concern when she saw the bruises which stood out so vividly on the smooth pale skin, and concern turned to dismay when she realized how he lay like a dead man, his legs trailing over the edge of the bunk and his body twisted awkwardly, one arm thrown back over his shoulder and his head lolling from side to side as Warlock rolled.

  She reached out quickly and touched his cheek, experiencing a lift of real relief as she felt the warmth of his flesh and saw his eyelids quiver at her touch.

  Gently she lifted his legs and he rolled easily on to his side, exposing the sickening abrasion that wrapped itself angrily across back and shoulder. She touched it with a light exploring fingertip and knew that it needed attention, but she sensed that rest was what he needed more.

  She stood back and for long seconds gave herself over to the pleasure of looking at him. His body was fined down, he carried no fat on his belly or flanks; clearly she could see the rack of his ribs below the skin, and the muscles of his arms and legs were smooth but well-defined, a body that had been cared for and honed by hard exercise. Yet there was a certain denseness to it, that thickening of shoulder and neck, and the distinctive hair patterns of the mature man.

  It might not have the grace and delicacy of the boys she had known, yet it was more powerful than that of even the strongest of the young men who had until then filled her world. She thought of one of them whom she had believed she loved. They had spent two months in Tahiti together on the same field expedition. She had surfed with him, danced and drunk wine, worked and slept sixty consecutive days and nights with him; in the same period they had become engaged to marry, and had argued, and parted, with surprisingly little regret on her part - but he had had the most beautiful tanned and sculptured body she had ever known. Now, looking at the sleeping figure on the bunk, she knew that even he would not have been able to match this man in physical determination and strength.

  Angel had been right. It was the power that attracted her so strongly. The powerful, rangy body with the dark coarse hair covering his chest and exploding in flak bursts in his armpits - this, together with the power of his presence.

  She had never known a man like this, he filled her with a sense of awe. It was not only the legend that surrounded him, nor the formidable list of his accomplishments that Angel had recounted for her, nor yet was it only the physical strength which he had just demonstrated while the entire crew of Warlock, she among them, had watched and listened avidly over the VHF relay. She leaned over him again, and she saw that even in repose, his jawline was hard and uncompromising, and the little creases and lines and marks that life had chiselled into his face, around the eyes, at the corners of the mouth, heightened the effect of power and determination, the face of a man who dictated his own terms to life.

  She wanted him, Angel was right, oh God, how she wanted him! They said there was no love at first sight - they had to be mad.

  She turned away and unfolded the eiderdown from the foot of the bunk, spreading it over him, and then once again she stooped and gently lifted the fall of thick dark hair from his forehead, smoothing it back with a maternally protective gesture.

  Although he had slept on while she lifted and covered him, strangely this lightest of touches brought him to the edge of consciousness and he sighed and twisted, then whispered hoarsely, ‘Chantelle, is that you?’

  Samantha recoiled a
t the bitter sharp pang of jealousy with which another woman's name stabbed her. She turned away and left him, but in the day cabin she paused again beside his desk.

  There were a few small personal items thrown carelessly on the leather-bound blotter, a gold money clip holding a mixed sheath of currency notes, five pounds sterling, fifty US dollars, Deutschmarks and francs, a gold Rolex Oyster perpetual watch, a gold Dunhill lighter with a single white diamond set in it, and a billfold of the smoothest finest calf leather. They described clearly the man who owned them and, feeling like a thief, she picked up the billfold and opened it.

  There were a dozen cards in their little plastic envelopes, American Express, Diners, Bank American, Carte Blanche, Hertz No. 1, Pan Am VIP and the rest. But opposite them was a colour photograph. Three people: a man, Nicholas in a cable-stitch jersey, his face bronzed, his hair windruffled; a small boy in a yachting jacket with a curly mop of hair and solemn eyes above a smiling mouth - and a woman. She was probably one of the most beautiful women Samantha had ever seen, and she closed the billfold, replaced it carefully, and quietly left the cabin.

  David Allen called the Captain's suite for three minutes without an answer, slapping his open palm on the mahogany chart table with impatience and staring through the navigation windows at the spectacle of a world gone mad.

  For almost two hours, the wind had blown steadily from the north-west at a little over thirty knots, and although the big humpy seas still tumbled into the mouth of the bay, Warlock had ridden them easily, even connected, as she was, to Golden Adventurer by the main tow-cable.

  David had put a messenger over the liner's stern, firing the nylon fine from a rocket gun, and Baker's men had retrieved the fine and winched across first the carrier wire and then the main cable itself.

  Warlock had let the main cable be drawn out of her by Adventurer's winches, slowly revolving off the great winch drums in the compartment under the tug's stern deck, out through the cable ports below the after navigation bridge where David stood controlling each inch of run and play with light touches on the controls.

  A good man could work that massive cable like a fly-fisherman playing a big salmon in the turbulent water of a mountain torrent, letting it slip against the clutch-plates, or run free, or recover slack, bringing it up hard and fast under a pull of five hundred tons - or, in dire emergency, he could hit the shear button, and snip through the flexible steel fibre, instantaneously relinquishing the tow, possibly saving the tug itself from being pulled under or being rushed by the vessel it was towing.

  It had taken an hour of delicate work, but now the tow was in place, a double yoke made fast to Golden Adventurer's main deck bollards, one on her starboard and one on her port stern quarters.

  The yoke was Y-shaped, drooping over the high stern to join at the white nylon spring, three times the thickness of a man’s thigh and with the elasticity to absorb sudden shock which might have snapped rigid steel cable. From the yoke connection, the single main cable looped back to the tug.

  David Allen was lying back a thousand yards from the shore, holding enough strain on the tow-cable to prevent it sagging to touch and possibly snag on the unknown bottom. He was holding his station with gentle play on the pitch and power of the twin screws, and checking his exact position against the electronic dials which gave him his speed across the ground in both directions, accurate to within a foot a minute.

  It was all nicely under control, and every time he glanced up at the liner, the discharge of water still boiled from her pump outlets.

  Half an hour previously, he had been unable to contain his impatience, for he knew with a seaman's deep instinct what was coming down upon them out of the dangerous quadrant of the wind. He had called Baker to ask how the work on the liner was progressing. It had been a mistake.

  ‘You've got nothing better to do than call me out of the engine room to ask about my piles, and the FA Cup final? I'll tell you when I'm ready, believe me, sonny, I'll call you. If you are bored, go down and give Angel a kiss, but for God's sake, leave me alone.’

  Beauty Baker was working with two of his men in that filthy, freezing steel box deep down in the liner's stern that housed the emergency steering-gear. The rudder was right across at full port lock. Unless he could get power on the steering machinery, she would be almost unmanageable, once she was under tow, especially if she was pulled off stern first. It was vital that the big ship was responding to her helm when Warlock tried to haul her off .

  Baker cursed and cajoled the greasy machinery, knocking loose a flap of thick white skin from his knuckles when a spanner slipped, but working on grimly without even bothering to lift the injury to his mouth to suck away the welling blood. He let it drop on to the spanner and thicken into a sticky jelly, swearing softly but viciously as he concentrated all his skills on the obdurate steel mass of the steering gear. He knew every bit as well as the First Officer what was coming down upon them.

  The wind had dropped to a gentle force four, a moderate steady breeze that blew for twenty minutes, just long enough for the crests of the waves to stop breaking over on themselves. Then slowly, it veered north - and without any further warning, it was upon them.

  It came roaring like a ravening beast, lifting the surface of the sea away in white sheets of spray that looked as though red-hot steel had been quenched in it, It laid Warlock right over, so that her port rail went under and she was flung up so harshly on her main cable that her stern was pulled down sharply, water pouring in through her stern scuppers.

  It took David by surprise, so that she paid off dangerously before he could slam open the port throttle and throw the starboard screw into full reverse thrust. As she came up, he hit the call to the Captain's suite, watching with rising disbelief as the mad world dissolved around him.

  Nick heard the call from far away, it only just penetrated to his fatigue-drugged brain, and he tried to respond, but it felt as though his body was crushed under an enormous weight and that his brain was slow and sluggish as a hibernating reptile.

  The buzzer insisted, a tinny, nagging whine and he tried to force his eyes open, but they would not respond. Then dimly, but deeply, he felt the wild anguished action of his ship and the tumult that he believed at first was in his own ears, but was the violent uproar of the storm about the tug's superstructure.

  He forced himself up on one elbow, and his body ached in every joint. He still could not open his eyes but he groped for the handset.

  ‘Captain to the after bridge!’ He could hear something in David Allen's voice that forced him to his feet.

  When Nick staggered on to the after navigation bridge, the First Officer turned gratefully to him.

  ‘Thank God you've come, sir.’

  The wind had taken the surface off the sea, had stripped it away, tearing each wave to a shrieking fog of white spray and mingling it with the sleet and snow that drove horizontally across the bay.

  Nick glanced once at the dial of the wind anemometer, and then discounted the reading. The needle was stuck at the top of the scale. It made no sense, a wind-speed of 120 miles an hour was too much to accept, the instrument had been damaged by the initial gusts of this wind, and he refused to believe it; to do so now would be to admit disaster, for nobody could salvage an ocean-going liner in wind velocities right off the Beaufort scale.

  Warlock stood on her tail, like a performing dolphin begging for a meal, as the cable brought her up short and the bridge deck became a vertical cliff down which Nick was hurled. He crashed into the control panel and clung for purchase to the foul-weather rail.

  ‘We'll have to shear the cable and stand out to sea.’ David Allen's voice was pitched too high and too loud, even for the tumult of the wind and the storm.

  There were men on board Golden Adventurer, Baker and sixteen others, Nick thought swiftly, and even her twin anchors could not be trusted to hold in this.

  Nick clung to the rail and peered out into the storm. Frozen spray and sleet and impacted snow dr
ove on the wind, coming in with the force of buckshot fired at point blank range, cracking into the armoured glass of the bridge and building up in thick clots and lumps that defeated the efforts of the spinning clear vision panels.

  He looked across a thousand yards and the hull of the liner was just visible, a denser area in the howling, swirling, white wilderness.

  ‘Baker?’ he asked into the hand microphone. ‘What is your position?’

  ‘The wind's got her, she's slewing. The starboard anchor is dragging.’ And then, while Nick thought swiftly, ‘You'll not be able to take us off in this.’ It was a flat statement, an acceptance of the fact that the destinies of Baker and his sixteen men were inexorably linked to that of the doomed ship.

  ‘No,’ Nick agreed. ‘We won't be able to get you off.’ To approach the stricken ship was certain disaster for all of them.

  ‘Shear the cable and stand off,’ Baker advised. We'll try to get ashore as she breaks up. Then, with a hangman's chuckle, he went on, ‘Just don't forget to come and fetch us when the weather moderates - that is if there is anybody to fetch.’

  Abruptly Nick's anger came to the surface through the layers of fatigue, anger at the knowledge that all he had risked and suffered was now to be in vain, that he was to lose Golden Adventurer, and probably with her sixteen men, one of whom had become a friend.

  ‘Are you ready to heave on the anchor winches?’ he asked. ‘We are going to pull the bitch off.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Baker. ‘She's still half flooded-‘

  ‘We will have a lash at it, cobber,’ said Nick quietly.

  ‘The steering-gear is locked, you won't be able to control her. You'll lose Warlock as well as –‘ but Nicholas cut Baker short.

  ‘Listen, you stupid Queensland sheep-shagger, get on to those winches.’ As he said it, Golden Adventurer disappeared, her bulk blotted out completely by the solid, white curtains of the blizzard.

  ‘Engine room,’ Nick spoke crisply to the Second Engineer. ‘Disengage the override, and give me direct control of both power and pitch.’