by Wilbur Smith
the open mouth of Table Bay.
Even before the helicopter rose and circled away towards the distant
glow of Cape Town city under its dark square mountain, the tanker's
great blunt bows were swinging away towards the west, and Duncan
imagined the relief of Captain Randle as he gave the order to make the
offing into the open Atlantic with the oceanic depths under his
cumbersome ship.
Duncan smiled again and reached for Peter Berg's hand.
Come on, my boy. I'm all right, sir. Skilfully Peter avoided the hand
and the smile, containing his wild excitement so that he walked ahead
like a man, without the skipping energy of a little boy.
Duncan Alexander felt the customary flare of annoyance. No, more than
that - bare anger at this further rejection by Berg's PUPPY. They went
in single file along the steel catwalk with the child leading. He had
never been able to get close to the boy and he had tried hard in the
beginning. Now Duncan stopped his anger with the satisfying memory of
how neatly he had used the child to slap Berg in the face, and draw the
fangs of his opposition.
Berg would be worrying too much about his brat to have time for anything
else. He followed Chantelle and the child into the gleaming chrome and
plastic corridors of the stern quarters. It was difficult to think of
decks and bulkheads rather than floors and walls in here. It was too
much like a modern apartment block, even the elevator which bore them
swiftly and silently five storeys up to the navigation bridge helped to
dispel the feelings of being ship-borne.
On the bridge itself, they were so high above the sea as to be divorced
from it. The deck lights had been extinguished once the helicopter had
gone, and the darkness of the night, silenced by the thick double-glazed
windows, heightened the peace and isolation. The riding lights in the
bows seemed remote as the very stars, and the gentle lulling movement of
the immense hull was only just noticeable.
The Master was a man of Duncan Alexander's own choosing. The command of
the flagship of Christy Marine should have gone to Basil Reilly, the
senior captain of the fleet. However, Reilly was Berg's man, and Duncan
had used the foundering of Golden Adventurer to force premature
retirement on the old sailor.
Randle was young for the responsibility, just a little over thirty years
of age, but his training and his credentials were impeccable, and he was
an honours graduate of the tanker school in France. Here top men
received realistic training in the specialized handling of these
freakish giants in cunningly constructed lakes and scale-model harbours,
working thirty-foot models of the bulk carriers that had all the
handling characteristics of the real ships.
Since Duncan had given him the command, he had been defending the design
and a staunch ally, and he had stoutly deconstruction of his ship when
the reporters, whipped up by Nicholas Berg, had questioned him. He was
loyal, which heavily, tipping the balance for Duncan against his youth
and inexperience.
He hurried to meet his important visitors as they stepped out of the
elevator into his spacious, gleaming modern bridge, a short stocky
figure with a bull neck and the thrusting heavy jaw of great
determination or great stubbornness. His greeting had just the right
mixture of warmth and servility, and Duncan noted approvingly that he
treated even the boy with careful respect. Randle was bright enough to
realize that one day the child would be head of Christy Marine. Duncan
liked a man who could think so clearly and so far ahead, but Randle was
not quite prepared for Peter Berg.
Can I see your engine room, Captain? You mean right now?
"Yes. For Peter the question was superfluous. if you don't mind, sir!
he added quickly. Today was for doing things and tomorrow was lost in
the mists of the future.
Right now, would be just fine, Well now/ the Captain realized the
request was deadly serious, and that this lad could not be put off very
easily, we go on automatic during the night. There's nobody down there
now - and it wouldn't be fair to wake the engineer, would it?
It's been a hard day.
suppose not. Bitterly disappointed, but amenable to convincing
argument, Peter nodded.
But I am certain the Chief would be delighted to have you as his guest
directly after breakfast. The Chief Engineer was a Scot with three sons
of his own in Glasgow, the youngest of them almost exactly Peter's age.
He was more than delighted. Within twenty-four hours, Peter was the
ship's favourite, with his own blue company-issue overalls altered to
fit him and his name embroidered across the back by the lascar steward
PETER BERG', He wore his bright yellow plastic hard hat at the same
jaunty angle as the Chief did, and carried a wad of cotton waste in his
back pocket to wipe his greasy hands after helping one of the stokers
clean the fuel filters - the messiest job on board, and the greatest
fun.
Although the engine control room with its rough camaraderie, endless
supplies of sandwiches and cocoa and satisfying grease and oil that made
a man look like a professional, was Peter's favourite station, yet he
stood other watches.
Every morning he Joined the First Officer on his inspection.
Starting in the bows, they worked their way back, checking each of the
pod tanks, every valve, and every one of the heavy hydraulic docking
clamps that held the pod tanks attached to the main frames of the hull.
Most important of all they checked the gauges on each compartment which
gave the precise indication of the gas mixtures contained in the air
spaces under the m-gin deck of the crude tanks.
Golden Dawn operated on the inert system to keep the trapped fumes in an
over-rich and safe condition. The exhaust fumes of the ship's engine
were caught, passed through filters and scrubbers to remove the
corrosive sulphur elements and then, as almost pure carbon dioxide and
carbon monoxide, they were forced into the air spaces of the petroleum
tanks. The evaporating fumes of the volatile elements of the crude
mingled with the exhaust fumes to form an over-rich, oxygen-poor, and
un-explosive gas.
However, a leak through one of the hundreds of valves and connections
would allow air into the tanks, and the checks to detect this were
elaborate, ranging from an unceasing electronic monitoring of each tank
to the daily physical inspection, in which Peter now assisted.
Peter usually left the First Officer's party when it returned to the
stern quarters, he might then pass the time of day with the two-men crew
in the central pump room.
From here the tanks were monitored and controlled, loaded and offloaded,
the flow of inert gas balanced, and the crude petroleum could be pushed
through the giant centrifugal pumps and transferred from tank to tank to
make alterations to the ship's trim, during partial discharge, or when
one or more tanks were detached and taken inshore for discharge.
/>
In the pump room was kept a display that always fascinated Peter.
It was the sample cupboard with its rows of screw-topped bottles, each
containing samples of the cargo taken during loading. As all four of
Golden Dawn's tanks had been filled at the same off-shore loading point
and all with crude from the same field, each of the bottles bore the
identical label.
EL BARRAS CRUDE
/C..
BUNKERS
HIGH CADMIUM Peter liked to take one of the bottles and hold it to the
light. Somehow he had always expected the crude oil to be treacly and
tarlike, but it was thin as human blood and when he shook the bottle, it
coated the glass and the light through it was dark red, again like
congealing blood.
Some of the crudes are black, some yellow and the Nigerians are green,
the pump foreman told him. This is the first red that I've seen. I
suppose it's the cadmium in it, Peter told him.
Guess it is/ the foreman agreed seriously; all on board had very soon
learned not to talk down to Peter Berg, he expected to be treated on
equal terms.
By this time it was mid-morning and Peter had worked up enough appetite
to visit the gallery, where he was greeted like visiting royalty. Within
days, Peter knew his way unerringly through the labyrinthine and usually
deserted passageways. It was characteristic of these great
crude-carriers that you might wander through them for hours without
meeting another human being. With their huge bulk and their tiny crews,
the only place where there was always human presence was the navigation
bridge on the top floor of the stern quarters.
The bridge was always one of Peter's obligatory stops.
Good-morning, Tug/ the officer of the watch would greet him.
Peter had been christened with his nickname when he had announced at the
breakfast table on his first morning: Tankers are great, but I'm going
to be a tug captain, like my dad. On the bridge the ship might be taken
out of automatic to allow Peter to spell the helmsman for a while, or he
would assist the junior deck officers while they made a sun shot as an
exercise to check against the satellite navigational Decca; then, after
socializing with Captain Randle for a while, it was time to report to
his true station in the engine We were waiting on you, Tug/ growled the
Chief. Get your overalls on, man, we're going down the propeller shaft
tunnel. The only unpleasant period of the day was when Peter's mother
insisted that he scrub off the top layers of grease and fuel oil, dress
in his number ones, and act as an unpaid steward during the cocktail
hour in the elaborate lounge of the owner's suite.
it was the only time that Chantelle Alexander fratemized with the ship's
officers and it was a painfully stilted hour, with Peter one of the
major sufferers - but the rest of the time he was successful in avoiding
the clinging restrictive rulings of his mother and the hated fiercely
but silently resented presence of Duncan Alexander, his stepfather.
Still, he was instinctively aware of the new and disturbing tensions
between his mother and Duncan Alexander.
In the night he heard the raised voices from the master cabin, and he
strained to catch the words. Once, when he had heard the cries of his
mother's distress, he had left his bunk and gone barefooted to knock on
the cabin door.
Duncan Alexander had opened it to him. He was in a silk dressing-gown
and his handsome features were swollen and flushed with anger.
Go back to bed. I want to see my mother, Peter had told him quietly.
You need a damned good hiding/ Duncan had flared.
Now do as you are told. I want to see my mother. Peter had stood his
ground, standing very straight in his pyjamas with both his tone and
expression neutral, and Chantelle had come to him in her nightdress and
knelt to embrace him.
It's all right, darling. It's perfectly all right. But she had been
weeping. After that there had been no more loud voices in the night.
However, except for an hour in the afternoon, when the swimming-pool was
placed out of bounds to officers and crew, while Chantelle swam and
sunbathed, she spent the rest of the time in the owner's suite, eating
all her meals there, withdrawn and silent, sitting at the panoramic
windows of her cabin, coming to life only for an hour, the evenings
while she played the owner's wife to the ship's officers.
Duncan Alexander, on the other hand, was like a caged animal. He paced
the open decks, composing long messages which were sent off regularly
over the telex in company code to Christy Marine in Leadenhall Street.
Then he would stand out on the open wing of Golden Dawn's bridge,
staring fixedly ahead at the northern horizon, awaiting the reply to his
last telex, chafing openly at having to conduct the company's business
at such long remove, and goaded by the devils of doubt and impatience
and fear.
he Often seemed as though he were trying to forge the mighty hull
onwards, faster and faster the north, by the sheer power of his will.
In the north-western corner of the Caribbean basin, there is an area of
shallow warm water, hemmed in on one side by the island chain of the
great Antilles, the bulwark of Cuba and Hispaniola, while in the west
the sweep of the Yucatan peninsula runs south through Panama into the
great land-mass of South America - shallow warm trapped water and
saturated tropical air, enclosed by land-masses which can heat very
rapidly in the high hot sun of the tropics. However, all of it is
gently cooled and moderated by the benign influence of the
north-easterly trade winds so unvarying in strength and direction that
over the centuries, sea-faring men have placed their lives and their
fortunes at risk upon their balmy wings, gambling on the constancy of
that vast moving body of mild air.
But the wind does fail, for no apparent reason and without previous
warning, it dies away, often merely for an hour or two, but occasionally
- very occasionally - for days or weeks at a time.
Far to the south and east of this devil's spawning ground, the Golden
Dawn ploughed massively on through the sweltering air and silken calm of
the doldrums, northwards across the equator, changing course every few
hours to maintain the great circle track that would carry her well clear
of that glittering shield of islands that the Caribbean carries, like an
armoured knight, on its shoulder.
The treacherous channels and passages through the islands were not for a
vessel of Golden Dawn's immense bulk, deep draught and limited
manoeuvrability. She was to go high above the Tropic of Cancer, and
just south of the island of Bermuda she would make her westings and
enter the wider and safer waters of the Florida Straits above Grand
Bahamas. On this course, she would be constricted by narrow and shallow
seaways for only a few hundred miles before she was out into the open
waters of the Gulf of Mexico again.
But while she ran on northwards, out of the area of equatorial calm, she
she did not. Day after day, the calm persisted, and stifling still air
pressed down on the ship. It did not in any way slow or affect her
passage, but her Master remarked to Duncan Alexander: Another corker
today, by the looks of it. When he received no reply from his brooding,
silent Chairman, he retired discreetly, leaving Duncan alone on the open
wing of the bridge, with only the breeze of the ship's passage ruffling
his thick coppery hair.
However, the calm was not merely local. It extended westwards in a
wide, hot belt across the thousand islands and the basin of shallow sea
they enclosed.
The calm lay heavily on the oily waters, and the sun beat down on the
enclosing land-masses, Every hour the air heated and sucked up the
evaporating waters; a fat bubble like a swelling blister began to rise,
the first movement of air in many days. It was not a big bubble, only a
hundred miles across, but as it rose, the rotation of the earth's
surface began to twist the rising air, spinning it like a top, so that
the satellite cameras, hundreds of miles above, recorded a creamy little
spiral wisp like the decorative icing flower on a wedding cake.
The cameras relayed the picture through many channels, until at last it
reached the desk of the senior forecaster of the hurricane watch at the
meteorological headquarters at Miami in southern Florida.
Looks like a ripe one/ he grunted to his assistant, recognizing that all
the favourable conditions for the formation of a revolving tropical
storm were present. We'll ask Airforce for a fly-through.
At forty-five thousand feet the pilot of the US Airforce B5.2 saw the
rising dome of the storm from two hundred miles away. It had grown
enormously in only six hours.
As the warm saturated air was forced upwards, so the icy cold of the
upper troposphere condensed the water vapour into thick puffed-up silver
clouds. They boiled upwards, roiling and swirling upon themselves.
Already the dome of cloud and ferociously turbulent air was higher than
the aircraft.
Under it, a partial vacuum was formed, and the surrounding surface air
tried to move in to fill it. But it was compelled into an
anti-clockwise track around the centre by the mysterious forces of the
earth's rotation. Compelled to travel the long route, the velocity of