Hungry as the Sea

by Wilbur Smith

Suddenly there was a sharp chemical stink in the air, and Nicholas

  gagged on it. The stink of crude petroleum oil gushing from the

  ruptured tank.

  Nicholas! Nicholas! The radio set slung over his shoulder squawked,

  and he lifted it to his lips without taking his eyes from the Golden

  Dawn's terrible death throes.

  Go ahead, Jules. Nicholas, I am turning to pick you up. You can't

  turn, not with that tow. I will ut my bows against the starboard

  quarterdeck p rail, directly under the forward wing of the bridge. Be

  ready to jump aboard., Jules, you are out of your head! I have been

  that way for fifty years/ Jules agreed amiably. Be ready. 'Jules, drop

  your tow first, Nicholas pleaded. It would be almost impossible to

  manoeuvre the Sea Witch with that monstrous dead weight hanging on her

  tail. Drop tow. We can pick up again later. You teach your

  grandfather to break eggs, I Jules blithely mangled the old saying,

  giving it a sinister twist.

  Listen Jules, the No. 4 tank has ruptured. I want you to shut down for

  fire. Do you understand? Full fire shut down.

  Once I am aboard, we will put a rocket into her and burn off cargo. I

  hear you, Nicholas, but I wish I had not.

  Nicholas left the control cubicle, jumped the gaping, chewing gap in the

  decking and scrambled up the steel ladder on to the central catwalk.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the endlessly slippery grey

  wall of racing cloud and wind; its menace was overpowering, so that for

  a moment he faltered before forcing himself into running back along the

  catwalk towards the tanker's stern tower half a mile ahead.

  The single remaining seaman was on the catwalk a hundred yards ahead of

  him, pounding determinedly back towards the pick-up point. He also had

  heard Jules Levoisin's last transmission.

  A quarter of a mile across the roiling, leaping waters, Jules Levoisin

  was bringing Sea Witch around. At another time Nicholas would have been

  impressed by the consummate skill with which the little Frenchman was

  handling his ship and its burdensome tow, but now there was time and

  energy for one thing only.

  The air stank. The heavy fumes of crude oil burned pumping lungs, and

  constricted his throat. He Nicholas coughed and gasped as he ran, the

  taste and reek of it coated his tongue and seared his nostrils.

  Below the catwalk, the bloated pod-tank was punctured in a hundred

  places by the steel lances of the disintegrating hull, pinched and torn

  by moving steel girders, and the dark red oil spurted and dribbled and

  oozed from it like the blood from the carcass of a mortally wounded

  poisonous dragon.

  Nicholas reached the stern tower, barged in through the storm doors to

  the lowest deck and reached the pump control room.

  Duncan Alexander turned to him, as he entered, his face swollen and

  bruised where Nicholas had beaten him.

  We are abandoning now/ said Nicholas. Sea Witch is taking us off. I

  hated you from that very first day/ Duncan was very calm, very

  controlled, his voice even, deep and cultured.

  Did you know that! There's no time for that now. Nicholas grabbed his

  arm, and Duncan followed him readily into the passageway.

  That's what the game is all about, isn't it, Nicholas, power and wealth

  and women - that's the game we played. Nicholas was barely listening.

  They were out on to the quarter-deck, standing at its starboard rail,

  below the bridge, the pick-up point that Jules had stipulated. Sea

  Witch was turning in, only five hundred yards out, and Nicholas had time

  now to watch Jules handle his ship.

  He was running out the heavy tow-cable on free spool, deliberately

  letting a long bight of it form between the tug and its enormous

  whalelike burden, and he was using the slack in the cable to cut in

  towards Golden Dawn's battered, sagging hulk. He would be alongside for

  the pickup in less than a minute.

  That was the game we played, you and I, Duncan was still talking calmly.

  Power and wealth and women Below them Golden Dawn poured her substance

  into the sea in a slick, stinking flood. The waves, battering against

  her side, churned the oil to a thick filthy emulsion, and it was

  spreading away across the surface, bleeding its deadly poison into the

  Gulf Stream to broadcast it to the entire ocean.

  I won/ Duncan went on reasonably. I won it all, every time - He was

  groping in his pockets, but Nicholas hardly heard him, was not watching

  him. - until now.

  Duncan took one of the self-igniting signal flares from his pocket and

  held it against his chest with both hands, slipping his index finger

  through the metal ring of the igniter tab.

  And yet I win this one also, Nicholas/ he said. Game, set and match.

  And he pulled the tab on the flare with a sharp jerk, and stepped back,

  holding it aloft.

  It spluttered once and then burst into brilliant sparkling red flame,

  white phosphorescent smoke billowing from it.

  Now at last Nicholas turned to face him, and for a moment he was too

  appalled to move. Then he lunged for Duncan's raised hand that held the

  burning flare, but Duncan was too fast for him to reach it.

  He whirled and threw the flame in a high spluttering arc, out over the

  leaking, stinking tank-deck.

  It struck the steel tank and bounced once, and then rolled down the

  canted oil-coated plating.

  Nicholas stood paralysed at the rail staring down at it.

  He expected a violent explosion, but nothing happened, the flare rolled

  innocently across the deck, burning with its pretty red twinkling light.

  It's not burning, Duncan cried. Why doesn't it burn?

  Of course, the gas was only explosive in a confined space, and it needed

  spark, Out here in the open air the oil had a very high flashpoint, it

  must be heated to release its volatiles.

  The flare caught in the scuppers and fizzled in a black pool of crude,

  and only then the crude caught. It caught with a red, slow, sulky flame

  that spread quickly but not explosively over the entire deck, and

  instantly, thick billows of dark smoke rose in a dense choking cloud.

  Below where Nicholas stood, the Sea Witch thrust her bows in and touched

  them against the tanker's side. The seaman beside Nicholas jumped and

  landed neatly on the tug's bows, then raced back along Sea Witch's deck.

  Nicholas, Jules voice thundered over the loudhailer.

  ,jump, Nicholas. Nicholas spun back to the rail and poised himself to

  jump.

  Duncan caught him from behind, whipping one arm around his throat, and

  pulling him backwards away from the rail.

  No/ Duncan shouted. You're staYing my friend. You are not going

  anywhere. You are staying here with me. A greasy wave of black choking

  smoke engulfed them, and Jules magnified voice roared in Nicholas ears -

  Nicholas, I cannot hold her here. jump, quickly, jump Duncan had him

  off-balance, dragging him backwards, away from the ship's side, and

  suddenly Nicholas knew what he must do.

  Instead of resisting Duncan's arm, he hurled himself backwards and they

  crashed togeth
er into the superstructure - but Duncan bore the combined

  weight of both their bodies.

  His armlock around the throat relaxed slightly and Nicholas drove his

  elbow into Duncan's side below the ribs, then wrenched his body for-ward

  from the waist, reached between his own braced legs and caught Duncan's

  ankles.

  He straightened up again, dragging Duncan off his feet and the same

  instant dropped backwards with his full weight on to the deck.

  Duncan gasped and his arm fell away, as Nicholas bounced to his feet

  again, choking in the greasy billows of smoke, and he reached the ship's

  side.

  Below him, the gap between Sea Witch's bows and the tanker's side was

  rapidly widening and the thrust of the sea and the drag of the tug

  pulled them apart.

  Nicholas vaulted on to the rail, poised for an instant and then jumped.

  He struck the deck and his teeth cracked together with the impact; his

  injured leg gave under him and he rolled once, then he was up on his

  hands and knees.

  He looked up at Golden Dawn. She was completely enveloped now in the

  boiling column of black smoke. As the flames heated the leaking crude,

  so it burned more readily. The bank of smoke was shot through now with

  the satanic crimson of high, hot flame.

  As Sea Witch sheered desperately away, the first rush of the storm hit

  them, and for a moment it smeared the smoke away, exposing the tanker's

  high quarter-deck.

  Duncan Alexander stood at the rail above the roaring holocaust of the

  tank-deck. He stood with his arms extended, and he was burning, his

  clothing burned fiercely and his hair was a bright torch of flame. He

  stood like a ritual cross, outlined in fire, and then slowly he seemed

  to shrivel and he'toppled forward over the rail into the bubbling,

  spurting, burning cargo of the monstrous ship that he had built - and

  the black smoke closed over him like a funeral cloak.

  As the crude oil escaping from the pierced pod tank fed the flames, so

  the heat built up swiftly, still sufficient to consume only the volatile

  aromatic spirits which constituted less than half the bulk of the cargo.

  The heavy carbon elements, not yet hot enough to burn, boiled off in

  that solid black column of smoke, and as the returning winds of the

  hurricane raced over the Golden Dawnonce more, so that filthy pall was

  mixed with air and lifted into the cloud bank of the storm, rising first

  a thousand, then ten, then twenty thousand feet above the surface of the

  ocean.

  And still Golden Dawn burned, and the temperatures of the gas and oil

  mixture trapped in her hull rocketed steeply. Steel glowed red, then

  brilliant white, ran like molten wax, and then like water - and suddenly

  the flashpoint of heavy carbon smoke in a mixture of air and water

  vapour was reached in the womb of this mighty furnace.

  Golden Dawm and her entire cargo turned into a fireball.

  The steel and glass and metal of her hull disappeared in an

  instantaneous explosive combustion that released temperatures like those

  upon the surface of the sun. Her cargo, a quarter of a million tons of

  it, burned in an instant, releasing a white blooming rose of pure heat

  so fierce that it shot up into the upper stratosphere and consumed the

  billowing pall of its own hydrocarbon gas and smoke.

  The very air burst into flame, the surface of the sea flamed in that

  white fireball of heat and even the clouds of smoke burned as the oxygen

  and hydrocarbon they contained exploded.

  Once an entire city had been subjected to this phenomena of fireball,

  when stone and earth and air had exploded, and five thousand German

  citizens of the city of Cologne had been vaporized, and that vapour

  burned in the heat of its own release.

  But this fireball was spawned by a quarter of a million tons of volatile

  liquids.

  . . .

  Can't you get us further away? Nicholas shouted above the thunder of

  the hurricane. His mouth was only inches from Jules Levoisin's ear.

  They were standing side by side, hanging from the overhead railing that

  gave purchase on this wildly pitching deck, If I open the taps I will

  part the tow wire, Jules shouted back, Sea Witch was alternately

  standing on her nose and then her tail. There was no forward view from

  the bridge, only green washes of sea water and banks of spray.

  The full force of the hurricane Was on them once more, and a glance at

  the radarscope showed the glowing image of Golden Dawn's crippled and

  bleeding hull only half a mile astern.

  Suddenly the glass of the windows was obscured by an blackness, and the

  light in Sea Witch's navigation bridge was reduced to only the glow of

  her fire-lights and the electronic instruments of her control console.

  Jules Levoisin turned his face to Nicholas, his plump features haunted

  by green shadows in the gloom.

  Smoke bank/ Nicholas shouted an explanation. There I was no reek of the

  filthy hydrocarbon in the bridge, for Sea Witch was shut down for fire

  drill, all her ports and ventilators sealed, her internal

  air-conditioning on a closed circuit, the air being scrubbed and

  recharged with oxygen by the big Carrier until above the main engine

  room. We are directly down wind of the Golden Dawn. A fiercer rush of

  the hurricane winds laid Sea Witch over on her side, the lee rail deep

  under the racing green sea, and held her there, unable to rise against

  the careless might of the storm for many minutes. Her crew hung

  desperately from any hand hold, the irksome burden of her tow helping to

  drag her down further; the propellers found no grip in the air, and her

  engines screamed in anguish.

  But Sea Witch had been built to live in any sea, and the moment the wind

  hesitated, she fought off the water that had come aboard and began to

  swing back.

  Where is Warlock? Jules bellowed anxiously. The danger of collision

  preyed upon him constantly, two ships and their elephantine tows

  manoeuvring closely in confined hurricane waters was nightmare on top of

  nightmare.

  Ten miles east of us., Nicholas picked the other tug's image out of the

  trash on the radarscope. They had a start, ahead of the wind He would

  have gone on, but the boiling bank of hydrocarbon smoke that surrounded

  Sea Witch turned to fierce white light, a light that blinded every man

  on the bridge as though a photograph flashlight had been fired in his

  face.

  Fireball! Nicholas shouted, and, completely blinded, reached for the

  remote controls of the water cannons seventy feet above the bridge on

  Sea Witch's fire-control tower.

  Minutes before, he had aligned the four water cannons, training them

  down at their maximum angle of depression, so now as he locked down the

  multiple triggers, Sea Witch deluged herself in a pounding cascade of

  sea water.

  Sea Witch was caught in a furnace of burning air, and despite the

  torrents of water she spewed over herself, her paintwork was burned away

  in instantaneous combustion so fierce that it consumed its own smoke,

  and almost instant
ly the bare scorched metal of her exposed upperworks

  began to glow with heat.

  The heat was so savage that it struck through the insulated hull,

  through the double glazing of the two-inch armoured glass of her bridge

  windows, scorching and frizzling away Nicholas eyelashes and blistering

  his lips as he lifted his face to it.

  The glass of the bridge windows wavered and swam as they began to melt -

  and then abruptly there was no more oxygen. The fireball had

  extinguished itself, consumed everything in its twenty seconds of life,

  everything from sea level to thirty thousand feet above it, a brief and

  devastating orgasm of destruction.

  It left a vacuum, a weak spot in the earth's thin skin of air, it formed

  another low pressure system smaller, but much more intense, and more

  hungry to be filled than the eye of hurricane Lorna itself.

  It literally tore the guts out of that great revolving storm, setting up

  counter winds and a vortex within the established system that ripped it

  apart.

  New gales blew from every Point about the fireball's vacuum, swiftly

  beginning their own dervish spirals and twenty miles short of the

  mainland of Florida, hurricane Lorna checked her mindless, blundering

  charge, fell in upon herself and disintegrated into fifty different

  willy.

  nilly squalls and whirlpools of air that collided and split again,

  slowly degenerating into nothingness.

  On a morning in April in Galveston roads, the salvage tug Sea Witch

  dropped off tow to four smaller harbour tugs who would take the Golden

  Dawn No. 3 Pod tank up the narrows to the Orient Amex discharge

  installation below Houston.

  Her sister ship Warlock, Captain David Allen Commanding, had dropped off

  his tandem tow of No. 1 and No. .2 pod tanks to the same tugs

  forty-eight hours previously.

  Between the two ships, they had made good salvage under Lloyd's Open

  Form of three-quarters of a million tons of crude petroleum valued at

  $85-50 U.S. a ton. To d the value of the three tanks the prize would

  be added themselves - not less than sixty-five million dollars all told,

  Nicholas calculated, and he owned both ships and the full share of the

  salvage award. He had not sold to the Shiekhs yet, though for every day

  of the tow from Florida Straites to Texas there had been frantic telex

  messages from James Teacher in London. The Sheikhs were desperate to