by Wilbur Smith
steady on the horizon without making any answer to the full application
of the rudder. The inertia of a million tons of crude oil, the immense
drag of the hull through water and the press of wind and current held
her on course, and although the single ferro-bronze propeller bit deeply
into the green waters, there was not the slightest diminution of the
tanker's speed.
Randle kept his hand on the engine telegraph, pulling back on the silver
handle with all his strength, as though this might arrest the great
ship's forward way through the water.
Turn! he whispered to the ship, and he stared at the fishing boat that
still lay, rolling wildly, directly in Golden Dawn's path. He noticed
irrelevantly that the tiny human figures along the rear rail were waving
frantically, and that the banner with its scarlet denunciation had torn
loose at one end and was now whipping and twisting like a Tibetan prayer
flag over the heads of the crew.
Turn, Randle whispered, and he saw the first response of the hull; the
angle between the bows and the fishing boat altered, it was a noticeable
change, but slowly accelerating and a quick glance at the control
console showed a small check in the ship's forward speed.
Turn, damn it, turn. Randle held the engine telegraph locked at full
astern, and felt the sudden influence of the Gulf Stream current on the
ship as she began to come across the direction of flow.
Ahead, the fishing boat was almost about to disappear from sight behind
Golden Dawn's high blunt bows.
He had been holding the ship at full astern for almost seven minutes
now, and suddenly Randle felt a change in Golden Dawn, something he had
never experienced before.
There was harsh, tearing, pounding vibration coming up through the deck.
He realized just how severe that vibration must be, when Golden Dawn's
monumental hull began to shake violently - but he could not release his
grip on the engine telegraph, not with that helpless vessel lying in his
track.
Then suddenly, miraculously, all vibration in the deck under his feet
ceased altogether. There was only the calm press of the hull through
the water, no longer the feel of the engine's thrust, a sensation much
more alarming to a mariner than the vibration which had preceded it, and
simultaneously, a fiery rash of red warning lights bloomed on the ship's
main control console, and the strident screech of the full emergency
audio-alarm deafened them all.
Only then did Captain Randle push the engine telegraph to stop'. He
stood staring ahead as the tiny fishing boat disappeared from view,
hidden by the angle from the navigation bridge which was a mile behind
the bows.
One of the officers reached across and hit the cut-out on the
audio-alarm. In the sudden silence every officer stood frozen, waiting
for the impact of collision.
Golden Dawn's Chief Engineer paced slowly along the engine-room control
console, never taking his eyes from the electronic displays which
monitored all the ship's mechanical and electrical functions.
When he reached the alarm aboard, he stopped and frowned at it angrily.
The failure of the single transistor, a few dollars worth of equipment,
had been the cause of such brutal damage to his beloved machinery. He
leaned across and pressed the test button, checking out each alarm
circuit, yet, while he was doing it, recognizing the fact that it was
too late. He was nursing the ship along, with God alone knew what
undiscovered damage to engine and main shaft only kept in check by this
reduced power setting - but there was a hurricane down there below the
southern horizon, and the Chief could only guess at what emergency his
machinery might have to meet in the. next few days.
It made him nervous and edgy to think about it. He searched in his back
pocket, found a sticky mint humbug, carefully picked off the little
pieces of lint and fluff before tucking it into his cheek like a
squirrel with a nut, sucking noisily upon it as he resumed his restless
prowling up and down the control console.
His on-duty stokers and the oilers watched him surreptitiously. When the
old man was in a mood, it was best not to attract attention.
Dickson! the Chief said suddenly. Get your lid on. We are going down
the shaft tunnel again. The oiler sighed, exchanged a resigned glance
with one of his mates and clapped his hard-hat on his head. He and the
Chief had been down the tunnel an hour previously. It was an
uncomfortable, noisy and dirty journey.
The oiler closed the watertight doors into the shaft tunnel behind them,
screwing down the clamps firmly under the Chief's frosty scrutiny, and
then both men stooped in the confined headroom and started off along the
brightly lit pale grey painted tunnel.
The spinning shaft in its deep bed generated a highpitched whine that
seemed to resonate in the steel box of the tunnel, as though it was the
body of a violin. Surprisingly, the noise was more pronounced at this
low speed setting, it seemed to bore into the teeth at the back of the
oiler's jaw like a dentist's drill.
The Chief did not seem to be affected. He paused beside the main
bearing for almost ten minutes, testing it with the palm of his hand,
feeling for heat or vibration. His expression was morose, and he
worried the mint humbug in his cheek and shook his head with foreboding
We are going on up the tunnel.
When he reached the main gland, he squatted down suddenly and peered at
it closely. With a deliberate fle of his jaw he crushed the remains of
the humbug between his teeth, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
There was a thin trickle of seawater oozing through the gland and
running down into the bilges. The Chief touched it with his finger.
Something had shifted, some balance was disturbed, the seal of the gland
was no longer watertight - such a small sign, a few gallons of seawater,
could be the first warning of major structural damage.
The Chief shuffled around, still hunched down beside the shaft bed, and
he lowered his face until it was only inches from the spinning steel
main shaft. He closed one eye, and cocked his head, trying once again
to decide if the faint blurring of the shaft's outline was real or
merely his over-active imagination, whether what he was seeing was
distortion or his own fears.
Suddenly, startlingly, the shaft slammed into stillness.
The deceleration was so abrupt that the Chief could actually see the
torque transferred into the shaft bed, and the metal walls creaked and
popped with the strain.
He rocked back on to his heels, and almost instantly the shaft began to
spin again, but this time in reverse thrust.
The whine built up swiftly into a rising shriek. They were Pulling
emergency power from the bridge, and it was madness, suicidal madness.
The Chief seized the oiler by the shoulder and shouted into his ear, Get
back to control - find out what the hell they are doing on the bridge.
The oiler scrambled away down the tunn
el; it would take him ten minutes
to negotiate the long narrow passage, open the watertight doors and
reach the control room and as long again to return.
The Chief considered going after him, but somehow he could not leave the
shaft now. He lowered his head again, and now he could clearly see the
flickering outline of the shaft. It wasn't imagination at all, there
was a little ghost of movement. He clamped his hands over his ears to
cut out the painful shriek of the spinning metal, but there was a new
note to it, the squeal of bare metal on metal and before his eyes he saw
the ghost outline along the edge of the shaft growing, the flutter of
machinery out of balance, and the metal deck under his feet began to
quiver.
God! They are going to blow the whole thing! he shouted, and jumped up
from his crouch. Now the deck was juddering and shaking under his feet.
He started back along the shaft, but the entire tunnel was agitating so
violently that he had to grab the metal bulkhead to steady himself, and
he reeled drunkenly, thrown about like a captive insect in a cruel
child's box.
Ahead of him, he saw the huge metal casting of the main bearing twisting
and shaking, and the vibration chattered his teeth in his clenched jaw
and drove up his spine like a jack hammer.
Disbelievingly he saw the huge silver shaft beginning to rise and buckle
in its bed, the bearing tearing loose from its mountings.
Shut down! he screamed. For God's sake, shut down! but his voice was
lost in the shriek and scream of tortured metal and machinery that was
tearing itself to pieces in a suicidal frenzy.
The main bearing exploded, and the shaft slammed it into the bulkhead,
tearing steel plate like paper.
The shaft itself began to snake and whip. The Chief cowered back,
pressing his back to the bulkhead and covering his ears to protect them
from the unbearable volume of noise.
A sliver of heated steel flew from the bearing and struck him in the
face, laying open his upper lip to the bone, crushing his nose and
snapping off his front teeth at the level of his gums.
He toppled forward, and the whipping, kicking shaft seized him like a
mindless predator and tore his body to pieces, pounding him and crushing
him in the shaft bed and splattering him against the pale metal walls.
The main shaft snapped like a rotten twig at the point where it had been
heated and weakened. The unbalanced weight of the revolving propeller
ripped the stump out
46o through the after seal, as though it were a tooth plucked from a
rotting jaw.
The sea rushed in through the opening, flooding the tunnel instantly
until it slammed into the watertight doors - and the huge glistening
bronze propeller, with the stump of the main shaft still attached, the
whole unit weighing one hundred and fifty tons, plummeted downwards
through four hundred fathoms to embed itself deeply in the soft mud of
the sea bottom.
Freed of the intolerable goad of her damaged shaft, Golden Dawn was
suddenly silent and her decks still and steady as she trundled on,
slowly losing way as the water dragged at her hull.
Samantha had one awful moment of sickening guilt. She saw clearly that
she was responsible for the deadly danger into which she had led these
people, and she stared out over the boat's side at the Golden Dawn.
The tanker was coming on without any check in her speed; perhaps she had
turned a few degrees, for her bows were no longer pointed directly at
them, but her speed was constant.
She was achingly aware of her inexperience, of her helplessness in this
alien situation. She tried to think, to force herself out of this
frozen despondency.
Life-jackets! she thought, and yelled to Sally-Anne out on the deck,
The life-jackets are in the lockers behind the wheelhouse. Their faces
turned to her, suddenly stricken. Up to this moment it had all been a
glorious romp, the old fun-game of challenging the money-grabbers,
prodding the establishment, but now suddenly it was mortal danger.
Move! Samantha shrieked at them, and there was a rush back along the
deck.
Think! Samantha shook her head, as though to clear it.
Think! she urged herself fiercely. She could hear the tanker now, the
silken rustling sound of the water under its hull, the sough of the bow
wave curling upon itself.
The Dicky's throttle linkage had broken before, when they had been off
Key West a year ago. It had broken between the bridge and the engine,
and Samantha had watched Tom Parker fiddling with the engine, holding
the lantern for him to see in the gloomy confines of the smelly little
engine room. She had not been certain how he did it, but she remembered
that he had controlled the revolutions of the engine by hand - something
on the side of the engine block, below the big bowl of the air filter.
Samantha turned and dived down the vertical ladder into the engine room.
The diesel was running, burbling away quietly at idling speed, not
generating sufficient power to move the little vessel through the water.
She tripped and sprawled on the greasy deck, and pulled herself up,
crying out with pain as her hand touched the red-hot manifold of the
engine exhaust.
On the far side of the engine block, she groped desperately under the
air filter, pushing and tugging at anything her fingers touched. She
found a coil spring, and dropped to her knees to examine it.
She tried not to think of the huge steel hull bearing down on them, of
being down in this tiny box that stank of diesel and exhaust fumes and
old bilges. She tried not to think of not having a life-jacket, or that
the tanker could tramp the little vessel deep down under the surface and
crush her like a matchbox.
Instead, she traced the little coil spring to where it was pinned into a
flat upright lever. Desperately she pushed the lever against the
tension of the spring - and instantly the diesel engine bellowed
deafeningly in her ears, startling her so that she flinched and lost the
lever. The diesel's beat died away into the bumbling idle and she
wasted seconds while she found the lever again and pushed it hard
against its stops once more. The engine roared, and she felt the ship
picking up speed under her. She began to pray incoherently.
She could not hear the words in the engine noise, and she was not sure
she was making sense, but she held the throttle open, and kept on
praying.
She did not hear the screams from the deck above her.
She did not know how close the Golden Dawn was, she did not know if Hank
Petersen was still in the wheelhouse conning the little vessel out of
the path of the onrushing tanker - but she held the throttle open and
prayed.
The impact when it came was shattering, the crash and crackle of timbers
breaking, the rending lurch and the roll of the deck giving to the
tearing force of it.
Samantha was hurled against the hot steel of the engine, her forehead
striking with such a force that her vi
sion starred into blinding white
light; she dropped backwards, her body loose and relaxed, darkness
ringing in her ears, and lay huddled on the deck.
She did not know how long she was unconscious, but it could not have
been for more than a few seconds; the spray of icy cold water on her
face roused her and she pulled herself up on to her knees.
In the glare of the single bare electric globe in the deck above her,
Samantha saw the spurts of water jets through the starting planking of
the bulkhead beside her.
Her shirt and denim pants were soaked, salt water half blinded her, and
her head felt as though the skull were cracked and someone was forcing
the sharp end of a bradawl between her Dimly she was aware that the
diesel engine was idling noisily, and that the deck was sloshing with
water as the boat rolled wildly in some powerful turbulence. She
wondered if the whole vessel had been trodden under the tanker.
Then she realized it must be the wake of the giant hull which was
throwing them about so mercilessly, but they were still afloat.
She began to crawl down the plunging deck. She knew where the bilge
pump was, that was one thing Tom had taught all of them - and she
crawled on grimly towards it.
Hank Petersen ducked out of the wheelhouse, flapping his arms wildly as
he struggled into the life-jacket. He was not certain of the best
action to take, whether to jump over the side and begin swimming away
from the tanker's slightly angled course, or to stay on board and take
his chances with the collision which was now only seconds away.
Around him, the others were in the grip of the same indecision; they
were huddled silently at the rail staring up at the mountain of smooth
rounded steel that seemed to blot out half the sky, only the TV
cameraman on the wheelhouse roof, a true fanatic oblivious of all
danger, kept his camera running. His exclamations of delight and the
burr of the camera motor blended with the rushing sibilance of Golden
Dawn's bow wave. It was fifteen feet hig that wave, and it sounded like
wild fire in dry grass.
Suddenly the exhaust of the diesel engine above Hank's head bellowed
harshly, and then subsided into a soft burbling idle again. He looked up
at it uncomprehendingly, now it roared again, fiercely , and the deck
lurched beneath him. From the stern he heard the boil of water driven