Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Good news, next.’ Bernard picked up the second file. ‘I think I've squared Esso. They hate you, they have threatened never to use your tugs again, but they are not going to sue.’ Nicholas had breached contract when he deserted the Esso tow and ran south for Golden Adventurer; the breach of contract suit had been hanging since then, It was a relief to have it aside. Bernard Wackie was worth every penny of his hire.

  ‘Okay. Next?’

  It went on for another six unbroken hours, piled on top of the jet-lag that Nicholas had accumulated across the Atlantic.

  ‘You okay?’ Bernard asked at last. Nicholas nodded though his eyes felt like hard-boiled eggs, and his chin was dark and raspy with beard.

  ‘You want something to eat?’ Bernard asked, and then Nick shook his head and realized that it was dark outside. ‘Drink?’ You'll need one for what comes next.’

  ‘Scotch,’ Nicholas agreed, and the secretary brought the tray through, and poured the drinks in another respectful hush.

  ‘That will be all, Mr. Wackie?’

  ‘For now, honey,’ Bernard watched her go, and then saluted Nicholas with his glass.

  ‘I give you the Golden Prince!’ And when Nicholas scowled, he went on swiftly, ‘No, Nicholas, I'm not shafting you. It's for real. You've done it again, The Sheikhs are fixing to make you an offer. They want to buy you out, take over the whole show, liabilities, everything. Of course, they'll want you to run it for them - two years, while you train one of their own men. A hell of a salary,’ he went on crisply, and Nicholas stared at him.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred grand, plus 2½% profits.’

  ‘Not the salary,’ Nicholas told him. ‘How much are they offering for the company?’

  ‘They are Arabs, the first offer is just to stir the pot a little.’

  ‘How much?’ Nicholas asked impatiently.

  ‘The sum of five was delicately mentioned.’

  ‘What do you think they'll go to?’

  ‘Seven, seven and half - eight, perhaps.’

  Through the fuzz of fatigue, far off like a lantern in the window on a winter's night, Nicholas saw the vision of a new life, a life such as Samantha had shown him. A life uncluttered, uncomplicated, shorn of all but joy and purpose.

  ‘Eight million dollars clear?’ Nicholas voice was husky, and he tried to wipe away the fatigue from his stinging eyelids with thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Maybe only seven,’ Bernard demurred, ‘but I'd try for eight.’

  ‘I'll have another drink,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘That's a splendid idea,’ Bernard agreed, and rang for his secretary with an anticipatory sparkle in his eyes.

  Samantha wore her hair in twin braids down her back, and hacked-off denim pants which left her long brown legs bare and exposed a pale sliver of tight round buttock at each step as she walked away. She had sandals on her feet and sun-glasses pushed up on top of her head.

  ‘I thought you were never coming,’ she challenged Nick as he stepped through the barrier at Miami International, He dropped his bag and fielded her rush against his chest. She clung to him and he had forgotten the clean, sun-drenched smell of her hair.

  She was trembling with a suppressed eagerness like a puppy, and it was only when a small quivering sob shook her shoulders that he realized she was weeping.

  ‘Hey now!’ He lifted her chin, and her eyes were flooded. She snuffled once loudly.

  ‘What's the trouble, little one?’

  ‘I'm just so happy,’ Samantha told him, and deeply Nicholas envied the ability to live so near the surface. To be able to cry with joy seemed to him at that moment to be the supreme human accomplishment, He kissed her and she tasted salty with tears. With surprise he felt a choke deep in his own throat.

  The jaded airport crowds had to open and trickle around the two of them like water around a rock, and they were oblivious to it all.

  Even when they came out of the building into the Florida sunlight, she had both arms around his waist, hampering his stride, as she led him to her vehicle.

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Nicholas, and he shied when he saw it. It was a Chevy van, but its paintwork had been restyled. ‘What's that? '

  ‘It's a masterpiece,’ she laughed. ‘Isn't it?’ It was rainbowed, in layers of vibrant colour and panels of fantastic landscapes and seascapes.

  ‘You did that?’ Nick asked, and he took his dark glasses from his breast pocket, and inspected the seagulls and palm trees and flowers through them.

  ‘It's not that bad,’ she protested. ‘I was bored and depressed without you. I needed something to brighten my life.’

  One of the panels depicted the translucent green of a curling wave, and on the face of the wave a pair of human figures on Hawaii boards and a graceful dolphin shape flew in formation together. Nick leaned closer and barely recognized the male figure as himself each detail of the features had been rendered with loving attention, and he came out of it looking something between Clark Gable and Superman - only a little more glamorous.

  ‘From memory,’ she said proudly.

  ‘It's tremendous,’ he told her. ‘But I've got bigger biceps, and I'm more beautiful.’

  Despite the wild choice of colour and the romantic style, he realized she had real talent.

  ‘You don't expect me to ride in that - what if one of my creditors saw me!’

  ‘Get your mind out of its stiff collar and blue suit, mister. You have just signed on for the voyage to never-never land by way of the moon.’

  Before she started the engine she looked at him seriously out of those great shining green eyes.

  ‘How long, Nicholas?’ she asked. ‘How long have we got together this time?’

  ‘Ten days,’ he told her. ‘Sorry, but I must be back in London by the 25th. There is a big one coming up, the big one. I'll tell you about it.’

  ‘No.’ She covered her ears with both hands. ‘I don't want to hear about it, not yet.’

  She drove the Chevy with careless unforced skill, very fast and efficiently, acknowledging the homage of other male drivers with a grin and a shake of her braids.

  When she slipped off highway 95 and parked in the lot of a supermarket, Nicholas raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Food,’ she explained, and then with a lascivious roll of her eyes, 'I reckon to get mighty hungry later.’

  She chose steaks, a bag full of groceries and a jug of California Riesling, and would not let him pay. ‘In this town, you are my guest.’

  Then she paid the toll and took the Rickenbacker causeway across the water to Virginia Key.

  ‘That's the marine division of the University of Miami and that's my lab at the top of the jetty, just beyond that white fishing boat - see it?’

  The low buildings were crowded into a corner of the island, between the sea-quarium and the wharves and jetties of the University's town lie the harbour.

  ‘We aren't stopping,’ Nicholas observed.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ she laughed at him, ‘I don't need a controlled scientific environment for the experiment I am about to conduct.’

  And with no diminution of speed, the Chevy flew across the long bridge between Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, and three miles on she turned off sharply left on a narrow dirt track that twisted through a lush tropical maritime forest of banyan and palmetta and palm, and ended at a clapboard shack just above the water.

  ‘I live close to the shop,’ Samantha explained, as she clattered up on to the screened porch, her arms full of groceries.

  ‘This is yours?’ Nicholas asked. He could just make out the tops of big blocks of condominiums on each side; they were incompletely screened by the palms.

  ‘Pa left it to me. He bought it the year I was born,’ Samantha explained proudly. ‘My ground stretches from there to there.’

  A few hundred yards, but Nicholas realized the value of it. Everybody in the world wants to live on the water, and those condominiums were pressing in closely.

 
‘It must be worth a million.’

  ‘There is no price on it,’ she said firmly. ‘That's what I tell those awful sweaty little men with their big cigars. Pa left it to me and it's not for sale.’

  She had the door open now, bumping it with her denim-clad backside.

  ‘Don't just stand there, Nicholas,’ she implored him. ‘We've only got ten days.’

  He followed her into the kitchen as she dumped her load into the sink, and whirled back to him.

  ‘Welcome by my house, Nicholas,’ and then as she slid her arms around his waist, jerked his shirt tails out of his belt and slid her hands up his bare back, ‘You'll never know just how welcome. Come, let me show you around - this is the living-room.’

  It had spartan furniture, with Indian rugs and pottery, and Samantha's chopped-off denims were discarded in the centre of the floor along with Nicholas shirt.

  ‘And this - surprise! surprise - is the bed-room.’ She dragged him by one hand, and under the short tee-shirt her bottom reminded him of a chipmunk with its cheeks stuffed with nuts, chewing vigorously.

  The tiny bedroom overlooked the beach. The sea breeze fluffed out the curtains and the sound of the low surf breathed like a sleeping giant, a deep regular hiss and sigh that filled the air around them.

  The bed was too big for the room, all ornate antique brass, with a cloudy soft mattress and an old-fashioned patchwork quilt in a hundred coloured and patterned squares.

  ‘I don't think I could have lived another day without you,’ she said, and unwound the thick plaits of her hair. ‘You came like the cavalry, in the very nick of time.’

  He reached up and took the golden tresses of hair, winding them thickly around his wrist, twining them in his fingers, and he pulled her gently down beside him.

  Suddenly Nick's life was uncluttered and simple again. Suddenly he was young and utterly carefree again. The petty strivings, the subterfuge, the lies and the cheating did not exist in this little universe that encompassed a tiny wooden shack on the edge of the ocean, and a huge brass bed that clanged and rattled and banged and squeaked wholesale, the completely abandoned happiness that was the special miracle called Samantha Silver.

  Samantha's laboratory was a square room, built on piles over the water, and the soft hum of the electric pumps blended with the slap of the wavelets below and the burble and blurp of the tanks.

  ‘This is my kingdom,’ she told him. ‘And these are my subjects.’ There were almost a hundred tanks, like the small glass-sided aquaria for goldfish, and suspended over each of them was a complicated arrangement of coils and bottles and electric wiring.

  Nick sauntered across to the nearest of the tanks and peered into it. It contained a single large salt-water clam; the animal was feeding with the double shells agape, the pink soft flesh and frilly gills rippling and undulating in the gentle flow of pumped and filtered sea water. To each half of the shell, thin copper wires were attached with blobs of polyurethane cement.

  Samantha came to stand beside him, touching, and he asked her, ’What's happening?’ She touched a switch and immediately the cylindrical scroll above the tank began to revolve slowly and a stylus, after a few preliminary jerks and quivers, began to trace out a regular pattern on the paper scroll, a trough and double peak, the second a fraction lower than the first, and then the trough again.

  She said, ‘He's wired and bugged.’

  ‘You're a member of the CIA,’ he accused.

  And she laughed. ‘His heart-beat. I'm passing an electric impulse through the heart - the heart is only a millimetre across - but each spasm changes the resistance and moves the stylus.’ She studied the curve for a moment. ‘This fellow is one very healthy cheerful Spisula solidissima.’

  ‘Is that his name? Nick asked. ‘I thought he was a clam.’

  ‘One of fifteen thousand bivalves who use that common generic,’ she corrected.

  ‘I had to pick an egghead,’ said Nicholas ruefully. ‘But what's so interesting about his heart?’

  ‘It's the closest and cheapest thing to a pollution metre that we have discovered so far - or rather,’ she corrected herself without false modesty, ‘that I have discovered.’

  She took his hand and led him down the long rows of tanks. ‘They are sensitive, incredibly sensitive to any contamination of their environment, and the heart-beat will register almost immediately any foreign element or chemical, organic or otherwise, in such low concentrate that it would take a highly trained specialist with a spectroscope to detect otherwise.’

  Nicholas felt his mild attention changing and growing into real interest as Samantha began to prepare samples of common pollutants on the single bench against the fore-wall of the cluttered little laboratory.

  ‘Here,’ she held up one test tube, ‘aromatic carbons, the more poisonous elements of crude petroleum - and here,’ she indicated the next tube, ‘mercury in a concentration of 100 parts to the million. Did you see the photographs of the human vegetables and the Japanese children with the flesh falling off their bones at Kiojo? That was mercury. Lovely stuff.’

  She picked up another tube. ‘PCB, a by-product of the electrical industry, the Hudson River is thick with it. And these, tetrahydrofurane, cyclohexane, methylbenzene - all industrial by-products, but don't let the fancy names throw you. One day they will come back to haunt us , in newspaper headlines, as THF or CMB - one day there will be other human cabbages and babies born without arms or legs.’ She touched the other tubes. ‘Arsenic, old-fashioned Agatha Christie vintage poison. And then here is the real living and breathing bastard daddy of them all - this is cadmium; as a sulphide so it's easily absorbed. In 100 parts to the million it's as lethal as a neutron bomb.’

  While he watched, she carried the tray of tubes across to the tanks and set the ECG monitors running. Each began to record the normal double-peaked heart-beat of a healthy clam.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘watch this.’

  Under controlled conditions, she began to drip the weak poisoned solutions into the reticulated water systems, a different solution to each of the tanks.

  ‘These concentrations are so low that the animals will not even be aware of trauma, they will continue to feed and breed without any but long-term indications of systemic poisoning.’

  Samantha was a different person, a cool quick-thinking professional. Even the white dust-coat that she had slipped over her tee-shirt altered her image and she had aged twenty years in poise and authority as she passed back and forth along the row of tanks.

  ‘There,’ she said, with grim satisfaction as the stylus on one recording drum made a slightly double beat at its peak and then just detectably flattened the second peak. ‘Typical aromatic carbon reaction.’

  The distorted heart-beat was repeated endlessly on the slowly turning drum, and she passed on to the next tank.

  ‘See the pulse in the trough, see the fractional speeding up of the heart spasm? That's cadmium in ten parts to the million, at 100 parts it will kill all sea life, at five hundred it will kill man slowly, at seven hundred parts in air or solution it will kill him very quickly indeed.’

  Nicholas’ interest became total fascination, as he helped Samantha record the experiments and control the flow and concentration in the tanks. Slowly they increased the dosage of each substance and the moving stylus dispassionately recorded the increasing distress and the final convulsions and spasmodic throes that preceded death.

  Nicholas voiced the tickle of horror and revulsion he felt at watching the process of degeneration.

  ‘It's macabre.’

  ‘Yes.’ She stood back from the tanks. ‘Death always is. But these organisms have such rudimentary nervous systems that they don't experience pain as we know it.’ She shuddered slightly herself and went on. ‘But imagine an entire ocean poisoned like one of these tanks, imagine the incredible agonies of tens of millions of sea birds, of the mammals, seals and porpoises and whales. Then think of what would happen to man himself .’ Samantha shrugged off
her white dust-coat.

  ‘Now I'm hungry,’ she announced, and then looking up at the fibreglass panels in the roof, ‘No wonder! It's dark already!’

  While they cleaned and tidied the laboratory, and made a last check of the pumps and running equipment, Samantha told him, ‘In five hours we have tested over a hundred and fifty samples of contaminated water and got accurate indications of nearly fifty dangerous substances - at a probable cost of fifty cents a sample.’ She switched out the lights.’ To do the same with a gas spectroscope would have cost almost ten thousand dollars and taken a highly specialized team two weeks of hard work.’

  ‘It's a hell of a trick,’ Nicholas told her. ‘You're a clever lady - I'm impressed, I really am.’

  At the psychedelic Chevy van she stopped him, and in the light of the street lamp looked up at him guiltily.

  ‘Do you mind if I show you off, Nicholas?’

  ‘What does that mean?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘The gang are eating shrimps tonight, Then they'll sleep over on the boat and have the first shot at fish tagging tomorrow - but we don't have to go. We could just get some more steaks and another jug of wine.’ But he could see she really wanted to go.

  She was fifty-five foot, an old purse-seiner with the ungainly wheelhouse forward looking like a sentry box or an old-fashioned pit latrine. Even with her coat of new paint, she had an old-fashioned look.

  She was tied up at the end of the University jetty, and as they walked out to her, so they could hear the voices and the laughter coming up from below decks.

  ‘Tricky Dicky,’Nicholas read her name on the high ugly rounded stern.

  ‘But we love her,’ Samantha said, and led him across the narrow, rickety gangplank. ‘She belongs to the University. She's only one of our four research vessels. The others are all fancy modern ships, two-hundred-footers, but the Dicky is our boat for short field trips to the gulf or down the Keys, and she's also the faculty clubhouse.’

  The main cabin was monastically furnished, bare planking and hard benches, a single long table, but it was as crowded as a fashionable discotheque, packed solid with sunburned young people, girls and boys all in faded jeans and tee-shirts, impossible to judge sexes by clothing or by the length of their sun-tortured and wind-tangled hair.