Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  Nicholas blinked, believing for an instant that his eyes had tricked him, for it seemed that the very earth had changed its shape and was moving.

  Then he saw that the great hull of Golden Dawn had begun to slide forward. The band burst into the Marseillaise, the heroic strains watered down by wind and distance, while Golden Dawn gathered momentum.

  It was an incredible, even a stirring sight, and despite himself, Nicholas felt the goose-bumps rise upon his forearms and the hair lift on the back of his neck. He was a sailor, and he was watching the birthing of the mightiest vessel ever built.

  She was grotesque, monstrous, but she was part of him. No matter that others had bastardized and perverted his grand design - still the original design was his and he found himself gripping the binoculars with hands that shook.

  He watched the massive wooden-wedged arresters kick out from under that great sliding mass of steel as they served to control her stern-first rush down the ways. Steel cable whipped and snaked upon itself like the Medusa's hair, and Golden Dawn's stern struck the water.

  The brown muddy water of the estuary opened before her, cleaved by the irresistible rush and weight, and the hull drove deep, opening white-capped rollers that spread out across the channel and broke upon the shores with a dull roar that carried clearly to where Nicholas stood.

  The crowd that lined the bridge was cheering wildly. Beside him, a mother held her infant up to watch, both of them screaming with glee.

  While Golden Dawn's bows were still on the dockyard's ways her stern was thrusting irresistibly a mile out into the river; forced down by the raised bows it must now be almost touching the muddy bottom for the wave was breaking around her stern quarters.

  God, she was huge! Nicholas shook his head in wonder. If only he had been able to build her the right way, what a ship she would have been. What a magnificent concept!

  Now her bows left the end of the slips, and the waters burst about her, seething and leaping into swirling vortices.

  Her stern started to rise, gathering speed as her own buoyancy caught her, and she burst out like a great whale rising to blow. The waters spilled from her, creaming and cascading through the steelwork of her open decks, boiling madly in the cavernous openings that would hold the pod tanks when she was fully loaded.

  Now she came up short on the hundreds of retaining cables that prevented her from driving clear across the river and throw herself ashore on the far bank.

  She fought against this restraint, as though having felt the water she was now eager to run. She rolled and dipped and swung with a ponderous majesty that kept the crowds along the bridge cheering wildly. Then slowly she settled and floated quietly, seeming to fill the Loire River from bank to bank and to reach as high as the soaring spans of the bridge itself.

  The four attendant harbour tugs moved in quickly to assist the ship to turn its prodigious length and to line up for the roads and the open sea.

  They butted and backed, working as a highly skilled team, and slowly they coaxed Golden Dawn around. Her sideways motion left a mile-wide sweep of disturbed water across the estuary. Then suddenly there was a tremendous boil under her counter, and Nicholas saw the bronze flash of her single screw sweeping slowly through the brown water. Faster and still faster it turned, and despite himself Nicholas thrilled to see her come alive. A ripple formed under her bows, and almost imperceptibly she began to creep forward, overcoming the vast inertia of her weight, gathering steerage way, under command at last.

  The harbour tugs fell back respectfully, and as the mighty bows lined up with the open sea she drove forward determinedly.

  Silver spouts of steam from the sirens of the tugs shot high, and moments later, the booming bellow of their salute crashed against the skies.

  The crowds had dispersed and Nicholas stood alone in the wind on the high bridge and watched the structured steel towers of Golden Dawn’s hull blending with the grey and misted horizon. He watched her turn, coming around on to her great circle course that would carry her six thousand miles southward to Good Hope, and even at this distance he sensed her change in mood as she steadied and her single screw began to push her up to top economic speed.

  Nicholas checked his watch and murmured the age-old Master's command that commenced every voyage.

  ‘Full away at 1700 hours,’ he said, and turned to trudge back along the bridge to where he had left the hired Renault.

  It was after six o'clock and the site was empty by the time Nicholas got back to Sea Witch. He threw himself into a chair and lit a cheroot while he thumbed quickly through his address book. He found what he wanted, dialled the direct London code, and then the number.

  ‘Good afternoon. This is the Sunday Times. May I help you?’

  ‘Is Mr. Herbstein available?’ Nicholas asked.

  ‘Hold on, please.’ While he waited, Nicholas checked his address book for his next most likely contact, should the journalist be climbing the Himalayas or visiting a guerrilla training camp in Central Africa, either of which were highly likely - but within seconds he heard his voice.

  ‘Denis,’ he said. ‘This is Nicholas Berg, how are you? I've got a hell of a story for you.’

  Nicholas tried to bear the indignity of it with stoicism, but the thick coating of pancake make-up seemed to clog the pores of his skin and he moved restlessly in the make-up chair.

  ‘Please keep still, sir!’ the make-up girl snapped irritably; there was a line of unfortunates awaiting her ministrations along the bench at the back of the narrow room. One of them was Duncan Alexander and he caught Nicholas eye in the mirror and raised an eyebrow in a mocking salute.

  In the chair beside him, the anchor-man of ‘The Today and Tomorrow Show’ lolled graciously; he was tall and elegant with dyed and permanently waved hair, a carnation in his button-hole, a high camp manner and an ostentatiously liberal image.

  ‘I've given you the first slot. If it gets interesting, I'll run you four minutes forty seconds, otherwise I'll cut it off at two.’

  Denis Herbstein's Sunday article had been done with high professionalism, especially bearing in mind the very short time he had to put it together. It had included interviews with representatives of Lloyd's of London, the oil companies, environmental experts both in America and England, and even with the United States Coast Guard.

  ‘Try to make it tight and hard,’ advised the anchor-man. ‘Let's not pussyfoot around.’ He wanted sensation, not too many facts or figures, good gory horror stuff - or a satisfying punch-up. The Sunday Times article had flushed them out at Orient Amex and Christy Marine; they had not been able to ignore the challenge for there was a question tabled for Thursday by a Labour member in the Commons, and ominous stirrings in the ranks of the American Coast Guard service.

  There had been enough fuss to excite the interest of ‘The Today and Tomorrow Show.’ They had invited the parties to meet their accuser and both Christy Marine and Orient Amex had fielded their first teams. Duncan Alexander with all his charisma had come to speak for Christy Marine, and Orient Amex had selected one of their directors who looked like Gary Cooper. With his craggy honest face and the silver hairs at his temple he looked like the kind of man you wanted flying your airliner or looking after your money.

  The make-up girl dusted Nicholas face with powder.

  ‘I'm going to invite you to speak first. Tell us about this stuff - what is it, cadmium?’ the interviewer checked his script.

  Nicholas nodded, he could not speak for he was suffering the ultimate indignity. The girl was painting his lips.

  The television studio was the size of an aircraft hangar, the concrete floor strewn with thick black cables and the roof lost in the gloomy heights, but they had created the illusion of intimacy in the small shell of the stage around which the big mobile cameras cluttered like mechanical crabs around the carcass of a dead fish.

  The egg-shaped chairs made it impossible either to loll or to sit upright, and the merciless white glare of the arc lamps frie
d the thick layer of greasy make-up on Nicholas’ skin. it was small consolation that across the table Duncan looked like a Japanese Kabuki dancer in make-up too white for his coppery hair.

  An assistant director in a sweatshirt and jeans clipped the small microphone into Nicholas lapel and whispered, ‘Give them hell, ducky.’

  Somebody else in the darkness beyond the lights was intoning solemnly, ‘Four, three, two, one - you're on!’ and the red light lit on the middle camera.

  ‘Welcome to The Today and Tomorrow Show,’ the anchor-man's voice was suddenly warm and intimate and mellifluous. ‘Last week in the French ship-building port of St Nazaire, the largest ship in the world was launched-’ In a dozen sentences he sketched out the facts, while on the repeating screens beyond the cameras Nicholas saw that they were running newsreel footage of Golden Dawn's launching. He remembered the helicopter hovering over the dockyard, and he was so fascinated by the aerial views of the enormous vessel taking to the water that when the cameras switched suddenly to him, he was taken by surprise and saw himself start on the little screen as the interviewer began introducing him, swiftly running a thumbnail portrait and then going on:

  ‘Mr. Berg has some very definite views on this ship.

  ‘In her present design and construction, she is not safe to carry even regular crude petroleum oil,’ Nicholas said. ‘However, she will be employed in the carriage of crude oil that has been contaminated by cadmium sulphide in such concentrations as to make it one of the more toxic substances in nature.’

  ‘Your first statement, Mr. Berg, does anyone else share your doubts as to the safety of her design?’

  ‘She does not carry the Al rating by the marine inspectors of Lloyd's of London,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Now can you tell us about the cargo she will carry - the so-called cad-rich crudes?’

  Nicholas knew he had perhaps fifteen seconds to draw a verbal picture of the Atlantic Ocean turned into a sterile poisoned desert; it was too short a time, and twice Duncan Alexander interjected, skilfully breaking up the logic of Nicholas presentation and before he had finished, the anchor-man glanced at his watch and cut him short.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Berg. Now Mr. Kemp is a director of the oil company.’

  ‘My company., Orient Amex, last year allocated the sum of two million U.S. dollars as grants to assist in the scientific study of world environmental problems. I can tell you folks, right now, that we at Orient Amex are very conscious of the problems of modern technology He was projecting the oil-company image, the benefactors of all humanity.’

  ‘Your company's profit last year, after taxation, was four hundred and twenty-five million dollars,’ Nicholas cut in clearly. ‘That makes point four seven percent on environmental research - all of it tax deductible. Congratulations, Mr. Kemp.’

  The oil man looked pained and went on: ‘Now we at Orient Amex,’ plugging the company name again neatly, ‘are working towards a better quality of life for all peoples. But we do realize that it is impossible to put back the clock a hundred years. We cannot allow ourselves to be blinded by the romantic wishful thinking of amateur environmentalists, the weekend scientists and the doom-criers who –‘

  ‘Cry Torrey Canyon,’ Nicholas suggested helpfully, and the oil man suppressed a shudder and went on quickly. ‘-who would have us discontinue such research as the revolutionary cadmium cracking process, which could extend the world's utilization of fossil fuels by a staggering forty percent and give the world's oil reserves an extended life of twenty years or more.’ Again the anchor-man glanced at his watch, cut the oil off in mid-flow and switched his attention to Duncan Alexander.

  ‘Mr. Alexander, your so-called ultra-tanker will carry the cad-rich crudes. How would you reply to Mr. Berg?’

  Duncan smiled, a deep secret smile. ‘When Mr. Berg had my job as head of Christy Marine, the Golden Dawn was the best idea in the world. Since he was fired, it's suddenly the worst.’ They laughed, even one of the cameramen out beyond the lights guffawed uncontrollably, and Nicholas felt the hot red rush of his anger.

  ‘Is the Golden Dawn rated Al at Lloyd's? asked the anchor-man.

  ‘Christy Marine has not applied for a Lloyd's listing, we arranged our insurance in other markets.’ Even through his anger Nicholas had to concede how good he was, he had a mind like quicksilver.

  ‘How safe is your ship, Mr. Alexander?’ Now Duncan turned his head and looked directly across the table at Nicholas.

  ‘I believe she is as safe as the world's leading marine architects and naval engineers can make her.’ He paused, and there was a malevolent gleam in his eyes now, ‘So safe, that I have decided to end this ridiculous controversy by a display of my personal confidence.’

  ‘What form will this show of faith take, Mr. Alexander?’ The anchor-man sensed the sensational line for which he had been groping and he leaned forward eagerly.

  ‘On Golden Dawn s maiden voyage, when she returns from the Persian Gulf fully laden with the El Barras crudes, I and my family, my wife and my step-son, will travel aboard her for the final six thousand miles of her voyage from Cape Town on the Cape of Good Hope to Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico.’ As Nicholas gaped at him wordlessly, he went on evenly, ‘That's how convinced I am that Golden Dawn is capable of performing her task in perfect safety.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The anchor-man recognized a good exit line, when he heard one. ‘Thank you, Mr. Alexander. You have convinced me - and I am sure many of our viewers. We are now crossing to Washington via satellite where-‘

  The moment the red in use light flickered out on the television camera, Nicholas was on his feet and facing the real Duncan Alexander. His anger was fanned by the realization that Duncan had easily grandstanded him with that adroit display of showmanship, and by the stabbing anxiety at the threat to take Peter aboard Golden Down on her hazardous maiden voyage.

  ‘You're not taking Peter on that death trap of yours,’ he snapped.

  ‘That’s his mother's decision,’ said Duncan evenly. ‘As the daughter of Arthur Christy, she's decided to give the company her full support,’ he emphasized the word ‘full'.

  ‘I won’t let either of you endanger my son's life for a wild public-relations stunt.’

  ‘I'm sure you will try to prevent it,’ Duncan nodded and smiled, ‘and I'm sure your efforts will be as ineffectual as your attempts to stop Golden Dawn.’ He deliberately turned his back on Nicholas and spoke to the oil man. ’I do think that went off rather well,’ he said, ‘don't you?’

  James Teacher gave a graphic demonstration of why he could charge the highest fees in London and still have his desk piled high with important briefs. He had Nicholas’ urgent application before a Judge-in-Chambers within seventy hours, petitioning for a writ to restrain Chantelle Alexander from allowing the son of their former marriage, one Peter Nicholas Berg, aged twelve years, to accompany her on an intended voyage from Cape Town in the Republic of South Africa to Galveston in the state of Texas aboard the bulk crude-carrier Golden Dawn, and/or to prevent the said Chantelle Alexander from allowing the child to undertake any other voyage aboard the said vessel.

  The judge heard the petition during a recess in the criminal trial of a young post-office worker standing accused of multiple rape. The judge's oak-panelled book-lined chambers were overcrowded by the two parties, their lawyers, the judge's registrar and the considerable bulk of the judge himself.

  Still in his wig and robes from the public court, the judge read swiftly through the written submission of both sides, listened attentively to James Teacher's short address and the rebuttal by his opposite number, before turning sternly to Chantelle.

  ‘Mrs. Alexander.’ The stern expression wavered slightly as he looked upon the devastating beauty which sat demurely before him.’ Do you love your son?’

  ‘More than anything else in this life.’ Chantelle looked at him steadily out of those vast dark eyes.

  ‘And you are happy to take him on this journey with you?’
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  ‘I am the daughter of a sailor, if there was danger I would understand it. I am happy to go myself and take my son with me.’

  The judge nodded, looked down at the papers on his desk for a moment.

  ‘As I understand the circumstances, Mr. Teacher, it is common ground that the mother has custody?’

  ‘That is so, my lord. But the father is the child's guardian.’

  ‘I'm fully aware of that, thank you,’ he snapped acidly. He paused again before resuming in the measured tones of judgement, ‘We are concerned here exclusively with the welfare and safety of the child. It has been shown that the proposed journey will be made during the holidays and that no loss of schooling will result. On the other hand, I do not believe that the petitioner has shown that there exists reasonable doubts about the safety of the vessel on which the voyage will be made. It seems to be a modern and sophisticated ship. To grant the petition would, in my view, be placing unreasonable restraint on the child's mother.’ He swivelled in his chair to face Nicholas and James Teacher. ‘I regret, therefore, that I see insufficient grounds to accede to your petition.’

  In the back seat of James Teacher's Bentley, the little lawyer murmured apologetically. ‘He was right, of course, Nicholas. I would have done the same in his place. These domestic squabbles are always –‘

  Nicholas was not listening. ‘What would happen if I picked up Peter and took him to Bermuda or the States?’

  ‘Abduct him?’ James Teacher's voice shot up an octave, and he caught Nicholas arm with genuine alarm. ‘I beg of you, dismiss the thought. They would have the police waiting for you - God!’ Now he wriggled miserably in his seat. ‘I can't bear to think of what might happen. Apart from getting you sent to gaol, your former wife might even get an order restraining you from seeing your boy again, she could get guardianship away from you. If you did that, you could lose the child, Nicholas. Don't do it. Please don't do it!’

  Now he patted Nicholas arm ingratiatingly.’ You'd be playing right into their hands.’ And then with relief he switched his attention to the briefcase on his lap.