by Wilbur Smith
Disbelievingly he saw the huge silver shaft beginning to rise and buckle in its bed, the bearing tearing loose from its mountings.
‘Shut down!’ he screamed. ‘For God's sake, shut down!’ but his voice was lost in the shriek and scream of tortured metal and machinery that was tearing itself to pieces in a suicidal frenzy.
The main bearing exploded, and the shaft slammed it into the bulkhead, tearing steel plate like paper.
The shaft itself began to snake and whip. The Chief cowered back, pressing his back to the bulkhead and covering his ears to protect them from the unbearable volume of noise.
A sliver of heated steel flew from the bearing and struck him in the face, laying open his upper lip to the bone, crushing his nose and snapping off his front teeth at the level of his gums.
He toppled forward, and the whipping, kicking shaft seized him like a mindless predator and tore his body to pieces, pounding him and crushing him in the shaft bed and splattering him against the pale metal walls.
The main shaft snapped like a rotten twig at the point where it had been heated and weakened. The unbalanced weight of the revolving propeller ripped the stump out through the after seal, as though it were a tooth plucked from a rotting jaw.
The sea rushed in through the opening, flooding the tunnel instantly until it slammed into the watertight doors - and the huge glistening bronze propeller, with the stump of the main shaft still attached, the whole unit weighing one hundred and fifty tons, plummeted downwards through four hundred fathoms to embed itself deeply in the soft mud of the sea bottom.
Freed of the intolerable goad of her damaged shaft, Golden Dawn was suddenly silent and her decks still and steady as she trundled on, slowly losing way as the water dragged at her hull.
Samantha had one awful moment of sickening guilt. She saw clearly that she was responsible for the deadly danger into which she had led these people, and she stared out over the boat's side at the Golden Dawn.
The tanker was coming on without any check in her speed; perhaps she had turned a few degrees, for her bows were no longer pointed directly at them, but her speed was constant.
She was achingly aware of her inexperience, of her helplessness in this alien situation. She tried to think, to force herself out of this frozen despondency.
‘Life-jackets!’ she thought, and yelled to Sally-Anne out on the deck, ‘The life-jackets are in the lockers behind the wheelhouse.’ Their faces turned to her, suddenly stricken. Up to this moment it had all been a glorious romp, the old fun-game of challenging the money-grabbers, prodding the establishment, but now suddenly it was mortal danger.
‘Move!’ Samantha shrieked at them, and there was a rush back along the deck.
‘Think!’ Samantha shook her head, as though to clear it. ‘Think!’ she urged herself fiercely. She could hear the tanker now, the silken rustling sound of the water under its hull, the sough of the bow wave curling upon itself.
The Dicky's throttle linkage had broken before, when they had been off Key West a year ago. It had broken between the bridge and the engine, and Samantha had watched Tom Parker fiddling with the engine, holding the lantern for him to see in the gloomy confines of the smelly little engine room. She had not been certain how he did it, but she remembered that he had controlled the revolutions of the engine by hand - something on the side of the engine block, below the big bowl of the air filter.
Samantha turned and dived down the vertical ladder into the engine room. The diesel was running, burbling away quietly at idling speed, not generating sufficient power to move the little vessel through the water.
She tripped and sprawled on the greasy deck, and pulled herself up, crying out with pain as her hand touched the red-hot manifold of the engine exhaust.
On the far side of the engine block, she groped desperately under the air filter, pushing and tugging at anything her fingers touched. She found a coil spring, and dropped to her knees to examine it.
She tried not to think of the huge steel hull bearing down on them, of being down in this tiny box that stank of diesel and exhaust fumes and old bilges. She tried not to think of not having a life-jacket, or that the tanker could tramp the little vessel deep down under the surface and crush her like a matchbox.
Instead, she traced the little coil spring to where it was pinned into a flat upright lever. Desperately she pushed the lever against the tension of the spring - and instantly the diesel engine bellowed deafeningly in her ears, startling her so that she flinched and lost the lever. The diesel's beat died away into the bumbling idle and she wasted seconds while she found the lever again and pushed it hard against its stops once more. The engine roared, and she felt the ship picking up speed under her. She began to pray incoherently.
She could not hear the words in the engine noise, and she was not sure she was making sense, but she held the throttle open, and kept on praying.
She did not hear the screams from the deck above her. She did not know how close the Golden Dawn was, she did not know if Hank Petersen was still in the wheelhouse conning the little vessel out of the path of the onrushing tanker - but she held the throttle open and prayed.
The impact when it came was shattering, the crash and crackle of timbers breaking, the rending lurch and the roll of the deck giving to the tearing force of it.
Samantha was hurled against the hot steel of the engine, her forehead striking with such a force that her vision starred into blinding white light; she dropped backwards, her body loose and relaxed, darkness ringing in her ears, and lay huddled on the deck.
She did not know how long she was unconscious, but it could not have been for more than a few seconds; the spray of icy cold water on her face roused her and she pulled herself up on to her knees.
In the glare of the single bare electric globe in the deck above her, Samantha saw the spurts of water jets through the starting planking of the bulkhead beside her.
Her shirt and denim pants were soaked, salt water half blinded her, and her head felt as though the skull were cracked and someone was forcing the sharp end of a bradawl between her. Dimly she was aware that the diesel engine was idling noisily, and that the deck was sloshing with water as the boat rolled wildly in some powerful turbulence. She wondered if the whole vessel had been trodden under the tanker.
Then she realized it must be the wake of the giant hull which was throwing them about so mercilessly, but they were still afloat.
She began to crawl down the plunging deck. She knew where the bilge pump was, that was one thing Tom had taught all of them - and she crawled on grimly towards it.
Hank Petersen ducked out of the wheelhouse, flapping his arms wildly as he struggled into the life-jacket. He was not certain of the best action to take, whether to jump over the side and begin swimming away from the tanker's slightly angled course, or to stay on board and take his chances with the collision which was now only seconds away.
Around him, the others were in the grip of the same indecision; they were huddled silently at the rail staring up at the mountain of smooth rounded steel that seemed to blot out half the sky, only the TV cameraman on the wheelhouse roof, a true fanatic oblivious of all danger, kept his camera running. His exclamations of delight and the burr of the camera motor blended with the rushing sibilance of Golden Dawn's bow wave. It was fifteen feet high that wave, and it sounded like wild fire in dry grass.
Suddenly the exhaust of the diesel engine above Hank's head bellowed harshly, and then subsided into a soft burbling idle again. He looked up at it uncomprehendingly, now it roared again, fiercely, and the deck lurched beneath him. From the stern he heard the boil of water driven by the propeller, and the Dicky shrugged off her lethargy and lifted her bows to the short steep swell of the Gulf Stream.
A moment longer Hank stood frozen, and then he dived back into the wheelhouse and spun the spokes of the wheel through his fingers, sheering off sharply, but still staring out through the side glass.
The Golden Dawn's bows filled his
whole vision now, but the smaller vessel was scooting frantically out to one side, and the tanker's bows were swinging majestically in the opposite direction.
A few seconds more and they would be clear, but the bow wave caught them and Hank was flung across the wheelhouse. He felt something break in his chest, and heard the snap of bone as he hit, then immediately afterwards there was the crackling rending tearing impact as the two hulls came together and he was thrown back the other way, sprawling wildly across the deck.
He tried to claw himself upright, but the little fishing boat was pitching and cavorting with such abandon that he was thrown flat again.
There was another tearing impact as the vessel was dragged down the tanker's side, and then flung free to roll her tails under and bob like a cork in the mill race of the huge ship's wake.
Now, at last, he was able to pull himself to his feet, and doubled over, clutching his injured ribs, he peered dazedly through the wheelhouse glass.
Half a mile away, the tanker was lazily turning up into the wind, and there was no propeller wash from under her counter. Hank staggered to the doorway, and looked out, The deck was still awash, but the water they had taken on was pouring out through the scuppers. The railing was smashed, most of it dangling overboard and the planking was splintered and torn, the ripped timber as white as bone in the sunlight.
Behind him, Samantha came crawling up the ladder from the engine room. There was a purple swelling in the centre of her forehead, she was soaking wet and her hands were filthy with black grease. He saw a livid red burn across the back of one hand as she lifted it to brush tumbled blonde hair out of her face.
‘Are you all right, Sam?’
‘Water's pouring in,’ she said. ‘I don't know how long the pump can hold it.’
‘Did you fix the motor?’ he asked.
Samantha nodded. ‘I held the throttle open,’ she said, and then with feeling, ‘but I'll be damned to hell if I'll do it again. Somebody else can go down there, I've had my turn.’
‘Show me how,’ Hank said, ‘and you can take the wheel. The sooner we get back to Key Biscayne, the happier I'll be.’
Samantha peered across at the receding bulk of Golden Dawn.
‘My God!’ she shook her head with wonder. ‘My God! We were lucky!’
‘Mackerel skies and mares' tails,
Make tall ships carry short sails.’
Nicholas Berg recited the old sailor's doggerel to himself, shading his eyes with one hand as he looked upwards.
The cloud was beautiful as fine lacework; very high against the tall blue of the heavens it spread swiftly in those long filmy scrolls. Nicholas could see the patterns developing and expanding as he watched, and that was a measure of the speed with which the high winds were blowing. That cloud was at least thirty thousand feet high, and below it the air was clear and crisp - only out on the western horizon the billowing silver and the blue thunderheads were rising, generated by the land-mass of Florida whose low silhouette was still below their horizon.
They had been in the main current of the Gulf Stream for six hours now. It was easy to recognize this characteristic scend of the sea, the short steep swells marching close together, the particular brilliance of these waters that had been first warmed in the shallow tropical basin of the Caribbean, the increased bulk flooding through into the Gulf of Mexico and there heated further, swelling in volume until they formed a hillock of water which at last rushed out through this narrow drainhole of the Florida Straits, swinging north and east in a wide benevolent wash, tempering the climate of all countries whose shores it touched and warming the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic.
In the middle of this stream, somewhere directly ahead of Warlock's thrusting bows, the Golden Dawn was struggling southwards, directly opposed to the current which would clip eighty miles a day off her speed, and driving directly into the face of one of the most evil and dangerous storms that nature could summon.
Nicholas found himself brooding again on the mentality of anybody who would do that; again he glanced upwards at the harbingers of the storm, those delicate wisps of lacy cloud.
Nicholas had sailed through a hurricane once, twenty years ago, as a junior officer on one of Christy Marine's small grain carriers, and he shuddered now at the memory of it.
Duncan Alexander was a desperate man even to contemplate that risk, a man gambling everything on one fall of the dice. Nicholas could understand the forces that drove him, for he had been driven himself - but he hated him now for the chances he was taking, Duncan Alexander was risking Nicholas son, and he was risking the life of an ocean and of the millions of people whose existence was tied to that ocean. Duncan Alexander was gambling with stakes that were not his to place at hazard.
Nicholas wanted one thing only now, and that was to get alongside Golden Dawn and take off his son. He would do that, even if it meant boarding her like a buccaneer, In the Master's suite, there was a locked and sealed arms cupboard with two riot guns, automatic 12 gauge shotguns and six Walther PK-38 Pistols. Warlock had been equipped for every possible emergency in any ocean of the world, and those emergencies could include piracy or mutiny aboard a vessel under salvage. Now Nicholas was fully prepared to take an armed party on board Golden Dawn, and to take his chances in any court of law afterwards.
Warlock was racing into the chop of the Gulf Stream and scattering the spray like startled white doves, but she was running too slowly for Nicholas and he turned away impatiently and strode into the navigation bridge.
David Allen looked up at him, a small frown of preoccupation marring the smooth boyish features.
‘Wind is moderating and veering westerly,’ he said, and Nicholas remembered another line of doggerel:
‘When the wind moves against the sun
Trust her not for back she'll run.’
He did not recite it, however, he merely nodded and said:
‘We are running into the extreme influence of Lorna. The wind will back again as we move closer to the centre.’
Nicholas went on to the radio room and the Trog looked up at him. It was not necessary for Nicholas to ask, the Trog shook his head. Since that long exchange with the coastguard patrol early that morning, Golden Dawn had kept her silence.
Nicholas crossed to the radarscope and studied the circular field for a few minutes; this usually busy seaway was peculiarly empty. There were some small craft crossing the main channel, probably fishing boats or pleasure craft scuttling for protection from the coming storm. All across the islands and on the mainland of Florida the elaborate precautions against the hurricane assault would be coming into force. Since the highway had been laid down on the spur of little islands that formed the Florida Keys, more than three hundred thousand people had crowded in there, in the process transforming those wild lovely islands into the Taj Mahal of ticky-tacky. If the hurricane struck there, the loss of life and property would be enormous, it was probably the most vulnerable spot on a long exposed coastline. For a few minutes, Nicholas tried to imagine the chaos that would result if a million tons of toxic crude oil was driven ashore on a littoral already ravaged by hurricane winds. It baulked his imagination, and he left the radar and moved to the front of the bridge. He stood staring down the narrow throat of water at a horizon that concealed all the terrors and desperate alarms that his imagination could conjure up.
The door to the radio shack was open and the bridge was quiet, so that they all heard it clearly; they could even catch the hiss of breath as the speaker paused between each sentence, and the urgency of his tone was not covered by the slight distortion of the VHF carrier beam.
‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the bulk oil carrier Golden Dawn. Our position is 79o 50'West 25o 43'North.’
Before Nicholas reached the chart-table, he knew she was still a hundred miles ahead of them, and, as he pored over the table, he saw his estimate confirmed.
'We have lost our propeller with main shaft failure and we are drifting out of control.
’
‘Nicholas’ head flinched as though he had been hit in the face. He could imagine no more dangerous condition and position for a ship of that size - and Peter was on board.
‘This is Golden Dawn calling the United States Coast Guard service or any ship in a position to afford assistance –‘
Nicholas reached the radio shack with three long strides, and the Trog handed him the microphone and nodded.
‘Golden Dawn this is the salvage tug Warlock. I will be in a position to render assistance within four hours-‘
Damn the rule of silence, Peter was on board her.
‘- Tell Alexander I am offering Lloyd's Open Form and I want immediate acceptance.’
He dropped the microphone and stormed back on to the bridge, his voice clipped and harsh as he caught David Allen's arm.
‘Interception course and push her through the gate,’ he ordered grimly. ‘Tell Beauty Baker to open all the taps.’ He dropped David's arm and spun back to the radio room.
‘Telex Levoisin on Sea Witch. I want him to give me a time to reach Golden Dawn at his best possible speed,’ and he wondered briefly if even the two tugs would be able to control the crippled and powerless Golden Dawn in the winds of a hurricane.
Jules replied almost immediately. He had bunkered at Charleston, and cleared harbour six hours previously. He was running hard now and he gave a time to Golden Dawn's position for noon the next day, which was also the forecast time of passage of the Straits for hurricane Lorna, according to the meteorological update they had got from Miami two hours before, Nicholas thought as he read the telex and turned to David Allen.
‘David, there is no precedent for this that I know of but with my son on board Golden Dawn I just have to assume command of this ship, on a temporary basis, of course.’
‘I'd be honoured to act as your First Officer again, sir,’ David told him quietly, and Nicholas could see he meant it.
‘If there is a good salvage, the Master's share will still be yours,’ Nicholas promised him, and thanked him with a touch on the arm. ‘Would you check out the preparations to put a line aboard the tanker?’