Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  The air was thick with the rich smell of broiling gulf shrimps and molten butter, and there were gallon jugs of California wine on the table.

  ‘Hey!’ Samantha shouted above the uproar of voices raised in heated dispute and jovial repartee. ‘This is Nicholas.’

  A comparative silence descended on the gathering, and they looked him over with the curious veiled group hostility of any tribe for an interloper, an intruder in a closed and carefully guarded group. Nick returned the scrutiny calmly, met each pair of eyes, while realizing that despite the affected informality of their dress and some of the wildly unkempt hairstyles and the impressive profusion of beards, they were an elite group. There was not a face that was not intelligent, not a pair of eyes that was not alert and quick, and there was that special feeling of pride and self-confidence in all of them.

  At the head of the table sat a big impressive figure, the oldest man in the cabin, perhaps Nick's age or a little older, for there were silver strands in his beard and his face was lined and beaten by sun and wind and time.

  ‘Hi, Nick,’ he boomed. ‘I won't pretend we've never heard of you. Sam has given us all cauliflower ears-‘

  ‘You cut that out, Tom Parker,’ Samantha stopped him sharply, and there was a ripple of laughter, a relaxation of tension and a casual round of greetings.

  ‘Hi, Nick, I'm Sally-Anne.’ A pretty girl with china-blue eyes behind wire-framed spectacles put a heavy tumbler of wine into his hand.

  ‘We are short of glasses, guess you and Sam will have to share.’

  She slid up along the bench and gave them a few inches of space and Samantha perched in Nicholas’ lap. The wine was a rough fighting red, and it galloped, booted and spurred across his palate but Samantha sipped her share with the same relish as if it had been a ‘53 Chateau Lafitte, and she nuzzled Nicholas’ ear and whispered:

  ‘Tom is prof of the Biology Department, he's a honey. After you - he's my most favourite man in the world.’

  A woman came through from the galley, carrying a huge platter piled high with bright pink shrimps and a bowl of molten butter. There was a roar of applause for her as she placed the dishes in the centre of the table, and they fell upon the food with unashamed gusto.

  The woman was tall with dark hair in braids and a strong capable face, lean and supple in tight breeches, but she was older than the other women and she paused beside Tom Parker and draped one arm across his shoulders in a comfortable gesture of long-established affection.

  ‘That's Antoinette, his wife.’ The woman heard her name and smiled across at them, and with dark gentle eyes she studied Nicholas and then nodded and made the continental O of thumb and forefinger at Samantha, before slipping back into the galley.

  The food did not inhibit the talk, the lively contentious flow of discussion that swung swiftly from banter to deadly seriousness and back again, bright trained informed minds clicking and cannoning off each other with the crispness of ivory billiard balls, while at the same time buttery fingers ripped the whiskered heads off the shrimps, delving for the crescent of sweet white flesh, then leaving greasy fingerprints on the wine tumblers.

  As each of them spoke, Samantha whispered their names and credentials. ‘Hank Petersen, he's doing a PhD on the blue-fill tuna - spawning and a trace of its migratory routes. He's the one running the tagging tomorrow.’

  ‘That's Michelle Rand, she's on loan from UCLA, and she's porpoises and whales.’

  Then suddenly they were all discussing indignantly a rogue tanker captain who the week before had scrubbed his tanks in the middle of the Florida straits and left a thirty-mile slick down the Gulf Stream, He had done it under cover of night, and changed course as soon as he was into the Atlantic proper.

  ‘We finger-printed him,’ Tom Parker like an angry bear, ‘we had him made, dead in the cross hairs.’ Nick knew he was talking of the finger-printing of oil residues, the breakdown of samples of the slick under gas spectroscopy which could match them exactly to the samples taken by the Coast Guard from the offender's tanks. The identification was good enough to bear up in an international court of law. ‘But the trick is getting the son-of-a-bitch into court.’ Tom Parker went on. 'He was fifty miles outside our territorial waters by the time the Coast Guard got to him, and he's registered in Liberia.’

  ‘We tried to cover cases like that in the set of proposals I put up to the last maritime conference.’ Nick joined the conversation for the first time. He told them of the difficulties of legislating on an international scale, of policing and bringing to justice the blatant transgressors; then he listed for them what had been done so far, what was in process and finally what he believed still should be done to protect the seas.

  He spoke quietly, succinctly, and Samantha noticed again, with a swell of pride, how all men listened when Nicholas Berg talked. The moment he paused, they came at him from every direction, using their bright young minds like scalpels, tearing into him with sharp lancing questions. He answered them in the same fashion, sharp and hard, armed with total knowledge of his subject, and he saw the shift in the group attitude, the blooming of respect, the subtle opening of ranks to admit him, for he had spoken the correct passwords and they recognized him as one of their own number, as one of the elite.

  At the head of the table, Tom Parker sat and listened, nodding and frowning, sitting in judgement with his arm around Antoinette's slim waist and she stood beside him and played idly with a curl of thick wiry hair on the top of his head.

  Tom Parker found fish forty miles offshore where the Gulf Stream was setting blue and warm and fast into the north. The birds were working, falling on folded wings down the backdrop of cumulonimbus storm clouds that bruised the horizon. The birds were bright, white pinpoints of light as they fell, and they struck the dark blue water with tiny explosions of white spray, and went deep. Seconds later they popped to the surface, stretching their necks to force down another morsel into their distended crops, before launching into flight again, climbing in steep circles against the sky to join the hunt again. There were hundreds of them and they swirled and fell like snowflakes.

  ‘Anchovy,’ grunted Tom Parker, and they could see the agitated surface of the water under the bird flock where the frenzied bait-fish churned. ‘Could be bonito working under them.’

  ‘No" said Nick. ‘They are blues.’

  ‘You sure?’ Tom grinned a challenge.

  ‘The way they are bunching and holding the bait-fish, it's tuna,’ Nick repeated.

  ‘Five bucks?’ Tom asked, as he swung the wheel over, and Tricky Dicky's big diesel engine boomed as she went on to the top of her speed.

  ‘You're on,’ Nick grinned back at him, and at that moment, they both saw a fish jump clear. It was a brilliant shimmering torpedo, as long as a man's arm. It went six feet into the air, turned in flight and hit the water again with a smack they heard clearly above the diesel.

  ‘Blues,’ said Nick flatly. ‘Shoal blues - they'll go twenty pounds each.’

  ‘Five bucks,’ Tom grunted with disgust.’ Son of a gun, I don't think I can afford you, man,’ and he delivered a playful punch to the shoulder which rattled Nick's teeth, then he turned to the open window of the wheelhouse and bellowed out on to the deck, ‘Okay, kids, they are blues.’ There was a scramble and chatter of excitement as they rushed for lines and tagging poles. It was Hank's show, he was the bluefin tunny expert, he knew as much about their sex habits, their migratory routes and food chains as any man living but when it came to catching them, Nick observed drily, he could probably do a better job as a blacksmith.

  Tom Parker was no fisherman either. He ran down the shoal, charging Tricky Dicky through the centre of it, scattering birds and fish in panic - but by sheer chance one of the gang in the stern hooked in, and after a great deal of heaving and huffing and shouted encouragement from his peers, dragged a single luckless baby blue-fin tuna over the rail. It skittered and jumped around the deck, its tail hammering against the planking, pursued by a s
hrieking band of scientists who slid and slipped in the fish slime, knocked each other down and finally cornered the fish against the rail. The first three attempts to affix the plastic tag were unsuccessful, Hank's lunges with the dart pole becoming wilder as his frustration mounted. He almost succeeded in tagging Samantha's raised backside as she knelt on the deck trying to cradle the fish in both arms.

  ‘You do this often?’ Nicholas asked mildly.

  ‘First time with this gang,’ Tom Parker admitted sheepishly. 'Thought you'd never guess.’

  By now the triumphant band was solicitously returning the fish to the sea, the barbed dart of the plastic tag embedded dangerously near its vitals; and if that didn't eventually kill it, the rough handling probably would. It had pounded its head on the deck so heavily that blood oozed from the gill covers, It floated away, belly up on the stream oblivious of Samantha's anguished cries of:

  ‘Swim, fish, get in there and swim!’

  ‘Mind if we try it my way?’ Nick asked, and Tom relinquished command without a struggle.

  Nicholas picked the four strongest and best coordinated of the young men, and gave them a quick demonstration and lecture on how to handle the heavy handlines with the Japanese feather lures, showing them how to throw the bait, and the recovery with an underhand flick that recoiled the line between the feet. Then he gave each a station along the starboard rail, with the second member of each team ready with a tagging pole and Hank Petersen on the roof of the wheel-house to record the fish taken and the numbers of the tags.

  They found another shoal within the hour and Nicholas circled up on it, closing steadily at good trolling speed, helping the feeding tuna bunch the shoal of frenzied anchovy on the surface, until he could lock Tricky Dicky's wheel hard down starboard and leave her to describe her own sedate circles around the shoal. Then he hurried out on to the deck.

  The trapped and surrounded fish thrashed the surface until it boiled like a porridge of molten, flashing silver; through it drove the fast dark torpedoes of the hungry tuna.

  Within minutes Nick had his four fishermen working to the steady rhythm of throwing the lures into the frothing water, almost instantly striking back on the line as a tuna snatched the feathers, and then swinging hand over head, recovering and coiling line fast with minimum effort, swinging the fish out and up with both hands and then catching its streamlined body under the left armpit like a quarter back picking up a long pass, clamping it there firmly, although the cold firm silver bullet shape juddered and quivered and the tail beat in a blur of movement. Then he taught them to slip the hook from the jaw, careful not to damage the vulnerable gills, holding the fish firmly but gently while the assistant pressed the barbed dart into the thick muscle at the back of the dorsal fill. When the fish was dropped back over the side, there were so few after-affects that it almost immediately began feeding again on the packed masses of tiny anchovies.

  Each plastic tag was numbered and imprinted with a request in five languages to mail it back to University of Miami with details of date and place of capture, providing a valuable trace of the movements of the shoals in their annual circumnavigation of the globe. From their spawning grounds somewhere in the Caribbean they worked the Gulf Stream north and cast across the Atlantic, then south down and around the Cape of Good Hope with an occasional foray down the length of the Mediterranean Sea although now the dangerous pollution of that landlocked water was changing their habits, From Good Hope east again south of Australia to take a gigantic swing up and around the Pacific, running the gauntlet of the Japanese long-liners and the California tunny men before ducking down under the terrible icy seas of the Horn and back to their spawning grounds in the Caribbean.

  They sat up on the wheelhouse as the Dicky ran home in the sunset, drinking beer and talking. Nicholas studied them casually and saw that they possessed so many of the qualities he valued in his fellow humans; they were intelligent and motivated, they were dedicated and free of that particular avarice that mars so many others.

  Tom Parker crumpled the empty beer can in a huge fist as easily as if it had been a paper packet, fished two more from the pack beside him and tossed one across to Nick. The gesture seemed to have some special significance and Nicholas saluted him with the can before he drank.

  Samantha was snuggled down in luxurious weariness against his shoulder, and the sunset was a magnificence of purple and hot molten crimson. Nicholas thought idly how pleasant it would be to spend the rest of his life doing things like this with people like these.

  Tom Parker's office had shelves to the ceiling, and they were sagging with hundreds of bottled specimens and rows of scientific papers and publications.

  He sat well back in his swivel chair with ankles crossed neatly in the centre of the cluttered desk.

  ‘I ran a check on you, Nicholas. Damned nerve, wasn't it? You have my apology.’

  ‘Was it an interesting exercise?’ Nicholas asked mildly.

  ‘It wasn't difficult. You have left a trail behind you like a –‘ Tom sought for a comparison, ‘like a grizzly bear through a honey farm. Son of a gun, Nicholas, that's a hell of a track record you've got yourself.’

  ‘I've kept busy,’ Nicholas admitted.

  ‘Beer?’ Tom crossed to the refrigerator in the corner that was labelled Zoological Specimens. DO NOT OPEN.

  ‘It's too early for me.’

  'Never too early,’ said Tom and pulled the tag on a dewy can of Millers and then picked up Nicholas’ statement. ‘Yes, you have kept busy. Strange, isn't it, that around some men things just happen.’

  Nicholas did not reply, and Tom went on, ‘We need a man around here who can do. It's all right thinking it out, then you need the catalyst to transform thought and intention into action.’ Tom sucked at the can and then licked the froth off his moustache. ‘I know what you have done, I've heard you speak, I've seen you move, and those things count. But most important of all, I know you care. I've been watching you carefully, Nick, and you really care, down deep in your guts, the way we do.’

  ‘It sounds as though you're offering me a job, Tom.’

  ‘I'm not going to horse around, Nick, I am offering you a job.’ He waved a huge paw, like a bunch of broiled pork sausages. ‘Hell, I know you're a busy man, but I'd like to romance you into an associate professorship. We'd want a little of your time when it came to hassling and negotiating up in Washington, we'd call for you when we needed real muscle to put our case, when we need the right contacts, somebody with a big reputation to open doors, when we need a man who knows the practical side of the oceans and the men that use them and abuse them.

  ‘We need a man who is a hard-headed businessman, who knows the economics of sea trade, who has built and run tankers, who knows that human need is of paramount importance, but who can balance the human need for protein and fossil fuels against the greater danger of turning the oceans into watery deserts.’ Tom lubricated his throat with beer, watching shrewdly for some reaction from Nicholas, and when he received no encouragement, he went on more persuasively. ‘We are specialists, perhaps we have the specialist's narrow view; God knows, they think of us as sentimentalists, the lunatic fringe of doomsayers, long-haired intellectual hippies. What we need is a man with real clout in the establishment, - shit, Nicholas, if you walked into a Congressional committee they'd really jerk out of their geriatric trance and switch on their hearing-aids.’Nicholas was silent still and Tom was becoming desperate. What can we offer in return? I know you aren't short of cash, and it would be a lousy twelve thousand a year, but an associate professorship is a nice title. We start out holding hands with that. Then we might start going steady, a full professorship - chair of applied oceanology, or some juicy title like that which we'd think up. I don't know what else we can offer you, Nick, except perhaps the warm good feeling in your guts when you're doing a tough job that has to be done.’ He stopped again, running out of words, and he wagged his big shaggy head sadly.

  ‘You aren't interested, are yo
u?’ he asked.

  Nick stirred himself. ‘When do I start?’ he asked, and as Tom's face split into a great beaming grin, Nick held out his hand. ‘I think I'll take that beer now.’

  The water was cool enough to be invigorating. Nick and Samantha swam so far out that the land was almost lost in the lowering gloom of dusk, and then they turned and swam back side by side. The beach was deserted; in their mood, the lights of the nearest condominiums were no more intrusive than the stars, the faint sound of music and laughter no more intrusive than the cry of gulls.

  It was the right time to tell her, and he did it in detail beginning with the offer by the Sheikhs to buy out Ocean Salvage and Towage.

  ‘Will you sell,’ she asked quietly. ‘You won't will you?’

  ‘For seven million dollars clear? he asked. ‘Do you know how much money that is?’

  ‘I can't count that far,’ she admitted. ‘But what would you do if you sold? I cannot imagine you playing bowls or golf for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Part of the deal is that I run Ocean Salvage for them for two years, and then I've been offered a part-time assignment which will fill any spare time I've got left over.’

  ‘What is it?’

  'Associate Professor at Miami University.’ She stopped dead and dragged him around to face her.

  ‘You're having me on!’ she accused.

  ‘That's a start only,’ he admitted. ‘In two years or so, when I've finished with Ocean Salvage, there may be a full chair of applied oceanology.’

  ‘It's not true!’ she said, and took him by the arms, shaking him with surprising strength.

  ‘Tom, wants me to ram-rod the applied aspects of the environmental research. I'll trouble-shoot with legislators and the maritime conference, a sort of hired gun for the Green-Peacers.’

  ‘Oh Nicholas, Nicholas!’