Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers Read online

  ‘ Suck and sing! ’ she commanded them, the sugar would combat the cold and the sea-sickness. ‘ Clap your hands. Keep moving we'll be there soon. ’

  When they could sing no more, she told them stories and whenever she mentioned the word dog they must all bark and clap their hands, or crow like the rooster, or bray like the donkey.

  Samantha's throat was scratchy with singing and talking and she was dizzy with fatigue and sick with cold, recognizing in herself the first symptoms of disinterest and lethargy, the prelude to giving up. She roused herself, struggling up into the sitting position from where she had slumped.

  ‘ I'm going to try and light the stove and get us a hot drink ,’ she sang out brightly. Around her there was only a mild stir and somebody retched painfully.

  ‘ Who's for a mug of beef tea –‘ she stopped abruptly. Something had changed. It took her a long moment to realize what it was. The sound of the wind had muted and the raft was riding more easily now, it was moving into a more regular rhythm of sweep and fall, without the dreadful jerk of the tow-rope snapping it back.

  Frantically she crawled to the entrance of the raft, and with cold crippled fingers she tore at the fastenings.

  O utside the dawn had broken into a clear cold sky of palest ethereal pinks and mauves. Although the wind had dropped to a faint whisper, the seas were still big and unruly, and the waters had changed from black to the deep bottle green of molten glass.

  The tow-rope had torn away at the connecting shackle, leaving only a dangling flap of plastic. Number 16 had been the last raft in the line being towed by number three, but of the convoy, Samantha could now see no sign - though she crawled out through the entrance and clung precariously to the side of the raft, scanning the wave-caps about her desperately.

  There was no sign of a lifeboat, no sight even of the rocky, ice-capped shores of Cape Alarm. They had drifted away, during the night, into the vast and lonely reaches of the Weddell Sea.

  Despair cramped her belly muscles, and she wanted to cry out in protest against this further cruelty of fate, but she prevented herself doing so, and stayed out in the clear and frosty air, drawing it in carefully for she knew that it could freeze her lung tissue. She searched and searched until her eyes streamed with the cold and the wind and concentration. Then at last the cold drove her back into the dark and stinking interior of the raft. She fell wearily among the supine and quiescent bodies, and pulled the hood of her anorak more tightly around her head. She knew it would not take long for them to start dying now, and somehow she did not care. Her despair was too intense, she let herself begin sinking into the morass of despondency which gripped all the others, and the cold crept up her legs and arms. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again with a huge effort.

  ‘I'm not going to die,’ she told herself firmly. ’I refuse to just lie down and die,’ and she struggled up onto her knees. It felt as though she wore a rucksack filled with lead, such was the physical weight of her despair.

  She crawled to the central locker that held all their emergency rations and equipment.

  The emergency locator transmitter was packed in polyurethane and her fingers were clumsy with cold and the thick mittens, but at last she brought it out. It was the size of a cigar-box, and the instructions were printed on the side of it. She did not need to read them, but switched on the set and replaced it in its slot. Now for forty-eight hours, or until the battery ran out, it would transmit a DF homing-signal on 121,5 Mega Hertz.

  It was possible, just possible, that the French tug might pick up that feeble little beam, and track it down to its source. She set it out of her mind, and devoted herself to the Herculean task of trying to heat half a mug of water on the small solid-fuel stove without scalding herself as she held the stove in her lap and balanced it against the raft's motion. While she worked, she searched for the courage and the words to tell the others of their predicament.

  The Golden Adventurer, deserted of all human beings, her engines dead, but with her deck lights still burning, her wheel locked hard over, and the morse key in the radio room screwed down to transmit a single unbroken pulse, drifted swiftly down on the black rock of Cape Alarm.

  The rock was of so hard a type of formation that the cliffs were almost vertical, and even exposed as they were to the eternal onslaught of this mad sea, they had weathered very little. They still retained the sharp vertical edges and the glossy polished planes of cleanly fractured faults.

  The sea ran in and hit the cliff without any check. The impact seemed to jar the very air, like the concussion of bursting high explosive, and the sea shot high in a white fury against the unyielding rock of the cliff, before rolling back and forming a reverse swell.

  It was these returning echoes from the cliff that held Golden Adventurer off the cliff. The shore was so steep-to that it dropped to forty fathoms directly below the cliffs. There was no bottom on which the ship could gut herself.

  The wind was blanketed by the cliff and in the eerie stillness of air, she drifted in closer and closer, rolling almost to her limits as the swells took her broadside. Once she actually touched the rock with her superstructure on one of those rolls, but then the echo-wave nudged her away. The next wave pushed her closer, and its smaller weaker offspring pushed back at her. A man could have jumped from a ledge on the cliff on to her deck as she drifted slowly, parallel to the rock.

  The cliff ended in an abrupt and vertical headland, where it had calved into three tall pillars of serpentine, as graceful as the sculptured columns of a temple of Olympian Zeus.

  Again, Golden Adventurer touched one of those pillars, she bumped it lightly with her stern. It scraped paint from her side and crushed in her rail, but then she was past.

  The light bump was just sufficient to push her stern round, and she pointed her bows directly into the wide shallow bay beyond the cliffs.

  Here a softer, more malleable rock-formation had been eroded by the weather, forming a wide beach of purple-black pebbles, each the size of a man's head and water worn as round as cannon balls.

  Each time the waves rushed up this stony beach, the pebbles struck against each other with a rattling roar, and the brash of rotten and mushy sea ice that filled the bay susurrated and clinked, as it rose and fell with the sea.

  Now Golden Adventurer was clear of the cliff, she was more fully in the grip of the wind. Although the wind was dying, it still had force enough to move her steadily deeper into the bay, her bows pointed directly at the beach.

  Unlike the cliff shore, the bay sloped up gently to the beach and this allowed the big waves to build up into rounded sliding humps.

  They did not curl and break into white water because the thick layer of brash ice weighted and flattened them, so that these swells joined with the wind to throw the ship at the beach with smoothly gathering impetus.

  She took the ground with a great metallic groan of her straining plates and canted over slowly, but the moving pebble beach moulded itself quickly to her hull, giving gradually, as the waves and wind thrust her higher and higher until she was firm aground; then, as the short night ended so the wind fell further, and in sympathy the swells moderated also and the tide drew back letting the ship settle more heavily.

  By noon of that day, Golden Adventurer was held firmly by the bows on the curved purple beach, canted over at an angle of 10°. Only her after end was still floating, rising and falling like a see-saw on the swell patterns which still pushed in steadily, but the plummeting air temperature was rapidly freezing the brash ice around her stern into a solid sheet.

  The ship stood very tall above the glistening wet beach. Her upperworks were festooned with rime and long rapier like stalactites of shining translucent ice hung from her scuppers and from the anchor fair-leads.

  Her emergency generator was still running, and although there was no human being aboard her, her lights burned gaily and piped music played softly through her deserted public rooms.

  Apart from the rent in her side,
through which the sea still washed and swirled, there was no external evidence of damage, and beyond her the peaks and valleys of Cape Alarm, so wild and fierce, seemed merely to emphasize her graceful lines and to underline how rich a prize she was, a luscious ripe plum ready for the picking.

  Down in her radio room, the transmitting key continued to send out an unbroken beam that could be picked up for five hundred miles around.

  Two hours of deathlike sleep - and then Nick Berg woke with a wild start, knowing that something of direct consequence was about to happen. But it took fully ten seconds for him to realize where he was.

  He stumbled from his bunk, and he knew he had not slept long enough. His skull was stuffed with the cotton wool of fatigue, and he swayed on his feet as he shaved in the shower, trying to steam himself awake with the scalding water.

  When he went out on to the bridge, the Trog was still at his equipment. He looked up at Nick for a moment with his little rheumy pink eyes, and it was clear that he had not slept at all. Nick felt a prick of shame at his own indulgence.

  ‘We are still inside La Mouette,’ said the Trog, and turned back to his set. ‘I reckon we have an edge of almost a hundred miles.’

  Angel appeared on the bridge, bearing a huge tray, and the saliva jetted from under Nick's tongue as he smelled it.

  ‘I did a little special for your brekker, Skipper,’ said Angel. ‘I call it "Eggs on Angel's Wings".’

  ‘I'm buying,’ said Nick, and turned back to the Trog with his mouth full and chewing. ‘What of the Adventurer?’

  ‘She's still sending a DF, but her position has not altered in almost three hours.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nick demanded, and swallowed heavily.

  ‘No change in position.’

  ‘Then she's aground,’ Nick muttered, the food in his hand forgotten, and at that moment David Allen hurried on to the bridge still shrugging on his pea-jacket. His eyes were puffy and his hair was hastily wetted and combed, but spiky at the back from contact with his pillow. It had not taken him long to hear that the Captain was on the bridge. ‘And in one piece, if her transmitter is still sending.’

  ‘It looks like those Hail Marys worked, David.’ Nick flashed his rare smile and David slapped the polished teak top of the chart table.

  ‘Touch wood, and don't dare the devil.’

  Nick felt his early despair slipping away with his fatigue, and he took another big mouthful and savoured it as he strode to the front windows and stared ahead.

  The sea had flattened dramatically, but a weak and butter-yellow sun low on the horizon gave no warmth, and Nick glanced up at the thermometer and read the outside air temperature at minus thirty degrees.

  Down here below 60° south, the weather was so unstable, caught up on the wheel of endlessly circling atmospheric depressions, that a gale could rise in minutes and drop to a flat calm almost as swiftly. Yet foul weather was the rule. For a hundred days and more each year, the wind was at gale-force or above. The photographs of Antarctica always gave a completely false impression of fine days with the sun sparkling on pristine snow fields and lovely towering icebergs. The truth was that you cannot take photographs in a blizzard or a white-out.

  Nick distrusted this calm, and yet found himself praying that it would hold. He wanted to increase speed again, and was on the point of taking that chance, when the officer of the watch called a sharp alteration of course.

  Ahead of them, Nick made out the sullen swirl of hidden ice below the surface, like a lurking monster, and as Warlock altered course to avoid it, the ice broke the surface. Black ice, striated with bands of glacial mud, ugly and deadly. Nick did not pass the order for the increase in speed.

  ‘We should be raising Cape Alarm within the hour,’ David Allen gloated beside him. ‘If this visibility holds.’

  ‘It won't,’ said Nick. ‘We'll have fog pretty soon,’ and he indicated the surface of the sea, which was beginning to steam, emitting ghostly tendrils and eddies of seafret, as the difference between sea and air temperature widened.

  ‘We'll be at the Golden Adventurer in four hours more.’ David was bubbling with renewed excitement, and he slapped the teak table again. ‘With your permission, sir, I'll go down and double-check the rocket-lines and tow equipment.’

  While the air around them thickened into a ghostly white soup, and blotted out all visibility to a few hundred yards, Nick paced the bridge like a caged lion, his hands clasped behind his back and a black unlit cheroot clamped between his teeth. He broke his pacing every time that the Trog intercepted another transmission from either Christy Marine, Jules Levoisin or Captain Reilly on his VHF radio.

  At midmorning, Reilly reported that he and his slow convoy had reached Shackleton Bay without further losses, that they were taking full advantage of the moderating weather to set up an encampment, and he ended by urging La Mouette to keep a watch on 121,5 Mega Hertz to try and locate the missing life-raft that had broken away during the night. La Mouette did not acknowledge.

  ‘They aren't reading on the VHF,’grunted the Trog.

  Nick thought briefly of the hapless souls adrift in this cold, and decided that they would probably not last out the day unless the temperature rose abruptly. Then he dismissed the thought and concentrated on the exchanges between Christy Marine and La Mouette.

  The two parties had diametrically changed their bargaining standpoints.

  While Golden Adventurer was adrift on the open sea, and any salvage efforts would mean that the tug should merely put a rocket-line across her, pass a messenger wire to carry the big steel hawser and then take her in tow, Jules Levoisin had pressed for Lloyd's Open Form ‘No cure no pay’ contract.

  Since the ‘cure’ was almost certain, ‘pay’ would follow as a matter of course. The amount of payment would be fixed by the arbitration of the committee of Lloyd's in London under the principles of international maritime law, and would be a percentage of the salved value of the vessel. The percentage decided upon by the arbitrator would depend upon the difficulties and dangers that the salvor had overcome. A clever salvor in an arbitration court could paint a picture of such daring and ingenuity that the award would be in millions of dollars.

  Christy Marine had been desperately trying to avoid a ‘No cure no pay’ contract. They had been trying to wheedle Levoisin into a daily hire and bonus contract, since this would limit the total cost of the operation, but they had been met by a Gallic acquisitiveness - right up to the moment when it became clear that Golden Adventurer had gone aground.

  When that happened, the roles were completely reversed. Jules Levoisin, with a note of panic in his transmission, had immediately withdrawn his offer to go Lloyd's Open Form. For now the cure was far from certain, and the Adventurer might already be a total wreck, beaten to death on the rocks of Cape Alarm, in which case there would be no pay.

  Now Levoisin was desperately eager to strike a daily hire contract, including the run from South America and the ferrying of survivors back to civilization. He was offering his services at $10,000 a day, plus a bonus Of 21.5% of any salved value of the vessel. They were fair terms, for Jules Levoisin had given up the shining dream of millions and he had returned to reality.

  However, Christy Marine, who had previously been offering a princely sum for daily hire, had just as rapidly withdrawn that offer.

  ‘We will accept Lloyd's Open Form, including ferrying of survivors,’ they declared on Channel 16.

  ‘Conditions on site have changed,’ Jules Levoisin sent back, and the Trog got another good fix on him.

  ‘We are head-reaching on him handsomely,’ he Announced with satisfaction, blinking his pink eyes rapidly while Nick marked the new relative positions on the chart.

  The bridge of Warlock was once again crowded with every officer who had an excuse to be there. They were all in their working thick blue boiler suits and heavy sea boots, bulked up with jerseys and balaclava helmets, and they watched the plot with total fascination, arguing quietly a
mong themselves.

  David Allen came in carrying a bundle of clothing. ‘I've working rig for you, sir. I borrowed it from the Chief Engineer. You are about the same size.’

  ‘Does the Chief know?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Not exactly, I just borrowed it from his cabin-‘

  ‘Well done, David,’ Nick chuckled. ‘Please put it in my day cabin.’ He felt himself warming more and more to the younger man.

  ‘Captain, sir,’ the Trog sang out suddenly. ‘I'm getting another transmission. It's only strength one, and it's on 121,5 Mega Hertz.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ David Allen paused in the entrance to the Captain's day cabin. ‘Oh, shit!’ he repeated, and his expression was stricken. ‘It's that bloody missing life-raft.’

  ‘Relative bearing!’ snapped Nick angrily.

  ‘She bears 280° relative and 045° magnetic,’ the Trog answered instantly, and Nick felt his anger flare again.

  The life-raft was somewhere out on their port beam, eighty degrees off their direct course to the Golden Adventurer.

  The consternation on the bridge was carried in a babble of voices, that Nick silenced with a single black glance and they stared at the plot in dismayed hush.

  The position of each of the tugs was flagged with a coloured pin and there was another, a red flag, for the position of the Golden Adventurer. It was so close ahead of them now, and their lead over La Mouette so slender, that one of the younger officers could not remain silent.

  ‘If we go to the raft, we'll be handing it to the bloody frog on a plate.’ The words ended the restraint and they began to argue again, but in soft controlled tones. Nick Berg did not look up at them, but remained bowed over the chart, with his fist on the table-top bunched so fiercely that the knuckles were ivory white.