by Wilbur Smith
The helicopter sank the last few feet and bumped gently on to the insulated green deck, with its thick coat of plasticized paint which prevented the striking of spark, Even a grain of sand trodden between leather sole and bare steel could ignite an explosive air and petroleum gas mixture.
The ship's party swarmed forward, doubled under the swirling rotor. The luggage in its net beneath the fuselage was dragged away and strong hands swung Peter down on to the deck. He stood blinking in the glare of deck lamps and wrinkling his nose to the characteristic tanker stench. It is a smell that pervades everything aboard one of these ships, the food, the furniture, the crew's clothing - even their hair and skin.
It is the thin acrid chemical stench of under-rich fumes vented off from the tanks. Oxygen and petroleum gas are only explosive in a mixture within narrow limits: too much oxygen makes the blend under-rich and too much petroleum gas makes it over-rich, either of which mixtures are non-explosive, non-combustible.
Chantelle Alexander was handed down next from the cabin of the helicopter, bringing an instant flash of elegance to the starkly lit scene of bleak steel and ugly functional machinery. She wore a cat-suit of dark green with a bright green Jean Patou scarf on her head. Two ship's officers closed in solicitously on each side of her and led her quickly away towards the towering stern quarters, out of the rude and blustering wind and the helicopter engine roar.
Duncan Alexander followed her down to the deck, shook hands quickly with the First Officer.
‘Captain Randle's compliments, sir. He is unable to leave the bridge while the ship is in the inshore channel.’
‘I understand.’ Duncan flashed that marvelous smile. The great ship drew almost twenty fathoms fully laden and she had come in very close, as close as was prudent to the mountainous coastline of Good Hope with its notorious currents and wild winds. However, Chantelle Christy must not be exposed to the ear-numbing discomfort of the helicopter flight for a moment longer than was necessary, and so Golden Dawn had come in through the inner channel, perilously close to the guardian rocks of Robben Island that stood in the open mouth of Table Bay.
Even before the helicopter rose and circled away towards the distant glow of Cape Town city under its dark square mountain, the tanker's great blunt bows were swinging away towards the west, and Duncan imagined the relief of Captain Randle as he gave the order to make the offing into the open Atlantic with the oceanic depths under his cumbersome ship.
Duncan smiled again and reached for Peter Berg's hand.
‘Come on, my boy.
‘I'm all right, sir.’ Skilfully Peter avoided the hand and the smile, containing his wild excitement so that he walked ahead like a man, without the skipping energy of a little boy. Duncan Alexander felt the customary flare of annoyance. No, more than that - bare anger at this further rejection by Berg's puppy. They went in single file along the steel catwalk with the child leading. He had never been able to get close to the boy and he had tried hard in the beginning. Now Duncan stopped his anger with the satisfying memory of how neatly he had used the child to slap Berg in the face, and draw the fangs of his opposition.
Berg would be worrying too much about his brat to have time for anything else. He followed Chantelle and the child into the gleaming chrome and plastic corridors of the stern quarters. It was difficult to think of decks and bulkheads rather than floors and walls in here. It was too much like a modern apartment block, even the elevator which bore them swiftly and silently five storeys up to the navigation bridge helped to dispel the feelings of being ship-borne.
On the bridge itself, they were so high above the sea as to be divorced from it. The deck lights had been extinguished once the helicopter had gone, and the darkness of the night, silenced by the thick double-glazed windows, heightened the peace and isolation. The riding lights in the bows seemed remote as the very stars, and the gentle lulling movement of the immense hull was only just noticeable.
The Master was a man of Duncan Alexander's own choosing. The command of the flagship of Christy Marine should have gone to Basil Reilly, the senior captain of the fleet. However, Reilly was Berg's man, and Duncan had used the foundering of Golden Adventurer to force premature retirement on the old sailor.
Randle was young for the responsibility, just a little over thirty years of age, but his training and his credentials were impeccable, and he was an honours graduate of the tanker school in France. Here top men received realistic training in the specialized handling of these freakish giants in cunningly constructed lakes and scale-model harbours, working thirty-foot models of the bulk carriers that had all the handling characteristics of the real ships.
Since Duncan had given him the command, he had been a staunch ally, and he had stoutly defending the design and construction of his ship when the reporters, whipped up by Nicholas Berg, had questioned him. He was loyal, which heavily, tipping the balance for Duncan against his youth and inexperience.
He hurried to meet his important visitors as they stepped out of the elevator into his spacious, gleaming modern bridge, a short stocky figure with a bull neck and the thrusting heavy jaw of great determination or great stubbornness. His greeting had just the right mixture of warmth and servility, and Duncan noted approvingly that he treated even the boy with careful respect. Randle was bright enough to realize that one day the child would be head of Christy Marine. Duncan liked a man who could think so clearly and so far ahead, but Randle was not quite prepared for Peter Berg.
‘Can I see your engine room, Captain?’
‘You mean right now?’
‘Yes.’ For Peter the question was superfluous. ‘If you don't mind, sir!’ he added quickly. Today was for doing things and tomorrow was lost in the mists of the future. ‘Right now, would be just fine.’
‘Well now,’ the Captain realized the request was deadly serious, and that this lad could not be put off very easily, ‘we go on automatic during the night. There's nobody down there now - and it wouldn't be fair to wake the engineer, would it? It's been a hard day.’
‘I suppose not.’ Bitterly disappointed, but amenable to convincing argument, Peter nodded.
‘But I am certain the Chief would be delighted to have you as his guest directly after breakfast.’
‘The Chief Engineer was a Scot with three sons of his own in Glasgow, the youngest of them almost exactly Peter's age. He was more than delighted. Within twenty-four hours, Peter was the ship's favourite, with his own blue company-issue overalls altered to fit him and his name embroidered across the back by the lascar steward ,“PETER BERG”, He wore his bright yellow plastic hard hat at the same jaunty angle as the Chief did, and carried a wad of cotton waste in his back pocket to wipe his greasy hands after helping one of the stokers clean the fuel filters - the messiest job on board, and the greatest fun.
Although the engine control room with its rough camaraderie, endless supplies of sandwiches and cocoa and satisfying grease and oil that made a man look like a professional, was Peter's favourite station, yet he stood other watches.
Every morning he Joined the First Officer on his inspection. Starting in the bows, they worked their way back, checking each of the pod tanks, every valve, and every one of the heavy hydraulic docking clamps that held the pod tanks attached to the main frames of the hull. Most important of all they checked the gauges on each compartment which gave the precise indication of the gas mixtures contained in the air spaces under the main deck of the crude tanks.
Golden Dawn operated on the inert system to keep the trapped fumes in an over-rich and safe condition. The exhaust fumes of the ship's engine were caught, passed through filters and scrubbers to remove the corrosive sulphur elements and then, as almost pure carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, they were forced into the air spaces of the petroleum tanks. The evaporating fumes of the volatile elements of the crude mingled with the exhaust fumes to form an over-rich, oxygen-poor, and unexplosive gas.
However, a leak through one of the hundreds of valves and connectio
ns would allow air into the tanks, and the checks to detect this were elaborate, ranging from an unceasing electronic monitoring of each tank to the daily physical inspection, in which Peter now assisted.
Peter usually left the First Officer's party when it returned to the stern quarters, he might then pass the time of day with the two-men crew in the central pump room.
From here the tanks were monitored and controlled, loaded and offloaded, the flow of inert gas balanced, and the crude petroleum could be pushed through the giant centrifugal pumps and transferred from tank to tank to make alterations to the ship's trim, during partial discharge, or when one or more tanks were detached and taken inshore for discharge.
In the pump room was kept a display that always fascinated Peter. It was the sample cupboard with its rows of screw-topped bottles, each containing samples of the cargo taken during loading. As all four of Golden Dawn's tanks had been filled at the same off-shore loading point and all with crude from the same field, each of the bottles bore the identical label.
EL BARRAS CRUDE
BUNKERS ‘C’
HIGH CADMIUM
Peter liked to take one of the bottles and hold it to the light. Somehow he had always expected the crude oil to be treacly and tarlike, but it was thin as human blood and when he shook the bottle, it coated the glass and the light through it was dark red, again like congealing blood.
‘Some of the crudes are black, some yellow and the Nigerians are green,’ the pump foreman told him. This is the first red that I've seen.’
‘I suppose it's the cadmium in it, Peter told him.’
‘Guess it is,’ the foreman agreed seriously; all on board had very soon learned not to talk down to Peter Berg, he expected to be treated on equal terms.
By this time it was mid-morning and Peter had worked up enough appetite to visit the galley, where he was greeted like visiting royalty. Within days, Peter knew his way unerringly through the labyrinthine and usually deserted passageways. It was characteristic of these great crude-carriers that you might wander through them for hours without meeting another human being. With their huge bulk and their tiny crews, the only place where there was always human presence was the navigation bridge on the top floor of the stern quarters.
The bridge was always one of Peter's obligatory stops.
‘Good-morning, Tug,’ the officer of the watch would greet him.
Peter had been christened with his nickname when he had announced at the breakfast table on his first morning:
‘Tankers are great, but I'm going to be a tug captain, like my dad.’
On the bridge the ship might be taken out of automatic to allow Peter to spell the helmsman for a while, or he would assist the junior deck officers while they made a sun shot as an exercise to check against the satellite navigational Decca; then, after socializing with Captain Randle for a while, it was time to report to his true station in the engine
‘We were waiting on you, Tug,’ growled the Chief. ‘Get your overalls on, man, we're going down the propeller shaft tunnel.’
The only unpleasant period of the day was when Peter's mother insisted that he scrub off the top layers of grease and fuel oil, dress in his number ones, and act as an unpaid steward during the cocktail hour in the elaborate lounge of the owner's suite.
It was the only time that Chantelle Alexander fraternized with the ship's officers and it was a painfully stilted hour, with Peter one of the major sufferers - but the rest of the time he was successful in avoiding the clinging restrictive rulings of his mother and the hated fiercely but silently resented presence of Duncan Alexander, his stepfather.
Still, he was instinctively aware of the new and disturbing tensions between his mother and Duncan Alexander. In the night he heard the raised voices from the master cabin, and he strained to catch the words. Once, when he had heard the cries of his mother's distress, he had left his bunk and gone barefooted to knock on the cabin door. Duncan Alexander had opened it to him. He was in a silk dressing-gown and his handsome features were swollen and flushed with anger.
‘Go back to bed.’
‘I want to see my mother,’ Peter had told him quietly.
‘You need a damned good hiding,’ Duncan had flared. Now do as you are told.’
‘I want to see my mother.’ Peter had stood his ground, standing very straight in his pyjamas with both his tone and expression neutral, and Chantelle had come to him in her nightdress and knelt to embrace him.
‘It's all right, darling. It's perfectly all right.’ But she had been weeping. After that there had been no more loud voices in the night.
However, except for an hour in the afternoon, when the swimming-pool was placed out of bounds to officers and crew, while Chantelle swam and sunbathed, she spent the rest of the time in the owner's suite, eating all her meals there, withdrawn and silent, sitting at the panoramic windows of her cabin, coming to life only for an hour, the evenings while she played the owner's wife to the ship's officers.
Duncan Alexander, on the other hand, was like a caged animal. He paced the open decks, composing long messages which were sent off regularly over the telex in company code to Christy Marine in Leadenhall Street.
Then he would stand out on the open wing of Golden Dawn's bridge, staring fixedly ahead at the northern horizon, awaiting the reply to his last telex, chafing openly at having to conduct the company's business at such long remove, and goaded by the devils of doubt and impatience and fear.
Often it seemed as though he were trying to forge the mighty hull onwards, faster and faster into the north, by the sheer power of his will.
In the north-western corner of the Caribbean basin, there is an area of shallow warm water, hemmed in on one side by the island chain of the great Antilles, the bulwark of Cuba and Hispaniola, while in the west the sweep of the Yucatan peninsula runs south through Panama into the great land-mass of South America - shallow warm trapped water and saturated tropical air, enclosed by land-masses which can heat very rapidly in the high hot sun of the tropics. However, all of it is gently cooled and moderated by the benign influence of the north-easterly trade winds so unvarying in strength and direction that over the centuries, seafaring men have placed their lives and their fortunes at risk upon their balmy wings, gambling on the constancy of that vast moving body of mild air.
But the wind does fail; for no apparent reason and without previous warning, it dies away, often merely for an hour or two, but occasionally - very occasionally - for days or weeks at a time.
Far to the south and east of this devil's spawning ground, the Golden Dawn ploughed massively on through the sweltering air and silken calm of the doldrums, northwards across the equator, changing course every few hours to maintain the great circle track that would carry her well clear of that glittering shield of islands that the Caribbean carries, like an armoured knight, on its shoulder.
The treacherous channels and passages through the islands were not for a vessel of Golden Dawn's immense bulk, deep draught and limited manoeuvrability. She was to go high above the Tropic of Cancer, and just south of the island of Bermuda she would make her westings and enter the wider and safer waters of the Florida Straits above Grand Bahamas. On this course, she would be constricted by narrow and shallow seaways for only a few hundred miles before she was out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico again.
But while she ran on northwards, out of the area of equatorial calm, she should have come out at last into the sweet cool airs of the trades, but she did not. Day after day, the calm persisted, and stifling still air pressed down on the ship. It did not in any way slow or affect her passage, but her Master remarked to Duncan Alexander:
‘Another corker today, by the looks of it.’
When he received no reply from his brooding, silent Chairman, he retired discreetly, leaving Duncan alone on the open wing of the bridge, with only the breeze of the ship's passage ruffling his thick coppery hair.
However, the calm was not merely local. It extended
westwards in a wide, hot belt across the thousand islands and the basin of shallow sea they enclosed.
The calm lay heavily on the oily waters, and the sun beat down on the enclosing land-masses, Every hour the air heated and sucked up the evaporating waters; a fat bubble like a swelling blister began to rise, the first movement of air in many days. It was not a big bubble, only a hundred miles across, but as it rose, the rotation of the earth's surface began to twist the rising air, spinning it like a top, so that the satellite cameras, hundreds of miles above, recorded a creamy little spiral wisp like the decorative icing flower on a wedding cake.
The cameras relayed the picture through many channels, until at last it reached the desk of the senior forecaster of the hurricane watch at the meteorological headquarters at Miami in southern Florida.
‘Looks like a ripe one,’ he grunted to his assistant, recognizing that all the favourable conditions for the formation of a revolving tropical storm were present. ‘We'll ask Airforce for a fly-through.’
At forty-five thousand feet the pilot of the US Airforce B52 saw the rising dome of the storm from two hundred miles away. It had grown enormously in only six hours.
As the warm saturated air was forced upwards, so the icy cold of the upper troposphere condensed the water vapour into thick puffed-up silver clouds. They boiled upwards, roiling and swirling upon themselves. Already the dome of cloud and ferociously turbulent air was higher than the aircraft.
Under it, a partial vacuum was formed, and the surrounding surface air tried to move in to fill it. But it was compelled into an anti-clockwise track around the centre by the mysterious forces of the earth's rotation. Compelled to travel the long route, the velocity of the air mass accelerated ferociously, and the entire system became more unstable, more dangerous by the hour, turning faster, perpetuating itself by creating greater wind velocities and steeper pressure gradients.
The cloud at the top of the enormous rising dome reached an altitude where the temperature was thirty degrees below freezing and the droplets of rain turned to crystals of ice and were smeared away by upper-level jet-streams. Long beautiful patterns of cirrus against the high blue sky were blown hundreds of miles ahead of the storm to serve as its heralds.