Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  David turned to leave the bridge, but Nicholas stopped him. 'By the time we get there, we will have the kind of wind you have only dreamed about in your worst nightmares - just keep that in mind.’

  'Telex,’ screeched the Trog. ‘Golden Dawn is replying to our offer.’ Nicholas strode across to the radio room, and read the first few lines of message as it printed out.

  ‘OFFER CONTRACT OF DAILY HIRE FOR TOWAGE THIS VESSEL FROM PRESENT POSITION TO GALVESTON ROADS’

  ‘The bastard,’ Nicholas snarled. ‘He's playing his fancy games with me, in the teeth of a hurricane and with my boy aboard.’ Furiously he punched his fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘Right!’ he snapped. ‘We'll play just as rough! Get me the Director of the U.S. Coast Guard at the Fort Lauderdale Headquarters - get him on the emergency coastguard frequency and I will talk to him in clear.’

  The Trog's face lit with malicious glee and he made the contact.

  ‘Colonel Ramsden,’ Nicholas said. ‘This is the Master of Warlock. I'm the only salvage vessel that can reach Golden Dawn before passage of Lorna, and I'm probably the only tug on the eastern seaboard of America with 22,000 horsepower. Unless the Golden Dawn's Master accepts Lloyd's Open Form within the next sixty minutes, I shall be obliged to see to the safety of my vessel and crew by running for the nearest anchorage - and you're going to have a million tons of highly toxic crude oil drifting out of control into your territorial waters, in hurricane conditions.’

  The Coast Guard Director had a deep measured voice, and the calm tones of a man upon whom the mantle of authority was a familiar garment.

  ‘Stand by, Warlock, I am going to contact Golden Dawn direct on Channel 16.

  Nicholas signalled the Trog to turn up the volume on Channel 16 and they listened to Ramsden speaking directly to Duncan Alexander.

  ‘In the event your vessel enters United States territorial waters without control or without an attendant tug capable of exerting that control, I shall be obliged under the powers vested in me to seize your vessel and take such steps to prevent pollution of our waters as I see fit. I have to warn you that those steps may include destruction of your cargo.’

  Ten minutes later the Trog copied a telex from Duncan Alexander personal to Nicholas Berg accepting Lloyd's Open Form and requesting him to exercise all dispatch in taking Golden Dawn in tow.

  ‘I estimate we will be drifting over the 100-fathom line and entering U.S. territorial waters within two hours,’ the message ended.

  While Nicholas read it, standing out on the protected wing of Warlock's bridge, the wind suddenly fluttered the paper in his hand and flattened his cotton shirt against his chest. He looked up quickly and saw the wind was backing violently into the east, and beginning to claw the tops of the Gulf Stream swells. The setting sun was bleeding copiously across the high veils of cirrus cloud which now covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

  There was nothing more that Nicholas could do now. Warlock was running as hard as she could, and all her crew were quietly going about their preparations to pass a wire and take on tow. All he could do was wait, but that was always the hardest part.

  Darkness came swiftly but with the last of the light, Nicholas could just make out a dark and mountainous shape beginning to hump up above the southern horizon like an impatient monster. He stared at it with awful fascination, until mercifully the night hid Lorna's dreadful face.

  The wind chopped the Gulf Stream up into quick confused seas, and it did not blow steadily, but flogged them with squally gusts and rain that crackled against the bridge windows with startling suddenness.

  The night was utterly black, there were no stars, no source of light whatsoever, and Warlock lurched and heeled to the patternless seas.

  ‘Barometer's rising sharply,’ David Allen called suddenly. ‘It's jumped three millibars - back to 1005’

  ‘The trough,’ said Nicholas grimly. It was a classic hurricane formation, that narrow girdle of higher pressure that demarcated the outer fringe of the great revolving spiral of tormented air. ‘We are going into it now.’

  And as he spoke the darkness lifted, the heavens began to burn like a bed of hot coals, and the sea shone with a sullen ruddy luminosity as though the doors of a furnace had been thrown wide.

  Nobody spoke on Warlock's bridge, they lifted their faces with the same awed expressions as worshippers in a lofty cathedral and they looked up at the skies.

  Low cloud raced above them, cloud that glowed and shone with that terrible ominous flare, Slowly the light faded and changed, turning a paler sickly greenish hue, like the shine on putrid meat. Nicholas spoke first.

  ‘The Devil's Beacon,’ he said, and he wanted to rationalize it to break the superstitious mood that gripped them all. It was merely the rays of the sun below the western horizon catching the cloud peaks of the storm and reflected downwards through the weak cloud cover of the trough but somehow he could not find the right words to denigrate that phenomenon that was part of the mariner's lore, the malignant beacon that leads a doomed ship on to its fate.

  The weird light faded slowly away leaving the night even darker and more foreboding than it had been before.

  ‘David,’ Nicholas thought quickly of something to distract his officers, ‘have we got a radar contact yet?’ and the new Mate roused himself with a visible effort and crossed to the radarscope.

  ‘The range is very confused,’ he said, his voice still subdued, and Nicholas joined him at the screen.

  The sweeping arm lit a swirling mass of sea clutter, and the strange ghost echoes thrown up by electrical discharges within the approaching storm. The outline of the Florida mainland and of the nearest islands of the Grand Bahamas bank were firm and immediately recognizable. They reminded Nicholas yet again of how little sea-room there was in which to manoeuver his tugs and their monstrous prize.

  Then, in the trash of false echo and sea clutter, his trained eye picked out a harder echo on the extreme limits of the set's range. He watched it carefully for half a dozen revolutions of the radar's sweep, and each time it was constant and clearer.

  ‘Radar contact,’ he said. ‘Tell Golden Dawn we are in contact, range sixty-five nautical miles. ‘Tell them we will take on tow before midnight.’ And then, under his breath, the old sailor's qualifications, ‘God willing and weather permitting.’

  The lights on Warlock's bridge had been rheostatted down to a dull rose glow to protect the night vision of her officers, and the four of them stared out to where they knew the tanker lay.

  Her image on the radar was bright and firm, lying within the two mile ring of the screen, but from the bridge she was invisible.

  In the two hours since first contact, the barometer had gone through its brief peak as the trough passed, and then fallen steeply.

  From 1005 it had crashed to 990 and was still plummeting, and the weather coming in from the east was blustering and squalling. The wind mourned about them on a forever rising note, and torrential rain obscured all vision outside an arc of a few hundred yards. Even Warlock's twin searchlights, set seventy feet above the main deck on the summit of the fire-control gantry, could not pierce those solid white curtains of rain.

  Nicholas groped like a blind man through the rain fog, using pitch and power to close carefully with Golden Dawn, giving his orders to the helm in a cool impersonal tone which belied the pale set of his features and the alert brightness of his eyes as he reached the swirling bank of rain.

  Abruptly another squall struck Warlock. With a demented shriek, it heeled the big tug sharply and shredded the curtains of rain, ripping them open so that for a moment Nicholas saw Golden Dawn.

  She was exactly where he had expected her to be, but the wind had caught the tanker's high navigation bridge like the mainsail of a tall ship, and she was going swiftly astern.

  All her deck and port lights were burning, and she carried the twin red riding lights at her stubby masthead that identified a vessel drifting out of control. The following sea dri
ven on by the rising wind piled on to her tank decks, smothering them with white foam and spray, so that the ship looked like a submerged coral reef.

  ‘Half ahead both,’ Nicholas told the helmsman. ‘Steer for her starboard side.’ He closed quickly with the tanker, staying in visual contact now; even when the rain mists closed down again, they could make out the ghostly shape of her and the glow of her riding lights.

  David Allen was looking at him expectantly and Nicholas asked, 'What bottom?’ without taking his eyes from the stricken ship.

  ‘One hundred sixteen fathoms and shelving fast.’ They were being blown quickly out of the main channel, on to the shallow ledge of the Florida littoral.

  ‘I'm going to tow her out stern first,’ said Nicholas, and immediately David saw the wisdom of it. Nobody would be able to get up into her bows to secure a tow-line, the seas were breaking over them and sweeping them with ten and fifteen feet of green water.

  ‘I'll go aft -' David began, but Nicholas stopped him.

  ‘No, David. I want you here - because I'm going on board Golden Dawn!’

  ‘Sir,’ David wanted to tell him that it was dangerous to delay passing the towing cable - with that lee shore waiting.

  ‘This will be our last chance to get passengers off her before the full hurricane hits us,’ said Nicholas, and David saw that it was futile to protest. Nicholas Berg was going to fetch his son.

  From the height of Golden Dawn's towering navigation bridge, they could look directly down on to the main deck of the tug as she came alongside.

  Peter Berg stood beside his mother, almost as tall as she was. He wore a full life-jacket and a corduroy cap pulled down over his ears.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he comforted Chantelle. ‘Dad is here. It will be just fine now.’ And he took her hand protectively.

  Warlock staggered and reeled in the grip of wind as she came up into the tanker's lee, rain blew over her like dense white smoke and every few minutes she put her nose down and threw a thick green slice of sea water back along her decks.

  In comparison to the tug's wild action, Golden Dawn wallowed heavily, held down by the oppressive weight of a million tons of crude oil, and the seas beat upon her with increasing fury, as if affronted by her indifference. Warlock edged in closer and still closer.

  Duncan Alexander came through from the communications room at the rear of the bridge. He balanced easily against Golden Dawn's ponderous motion but his face was swollen and flushed with anger.

  ‘Berg is coming on board,’ he burst out. ‘He's wasting valuable time. I warned him that we must get out into deeper water.’

  Peter Berg interrupted suddenly and pointed down at Warlock, ‘Look’ he cried.

  Until that moment, the night and the storm had hidden the small huddle of human shapes in the tug’s high forward tower. They wore wet, glistening oilskins and their life-jackets gave them a swollen pregnant look. They were lowering the boarding gantry into the horizontal position.

  ‘There is dad!’ Peter shouted. ‘That’s him in front.’

  At the extremity of her roll, Warlock’s boarding gantry touched the railing of the tanker’s quarter-deck, ten feet above the swamped tank deck – and the leading figure on the tug’s upperworks ran out lightly along the gantry, balanced for a moment high above the roaring, racing green water and then leapt across five feet of open space, caught a hand hold and then pulled himself over Golden Dawn’s rail.

  Immediately the tug sheered off and fell in fifty yards off the tanker’s starboard side, half hidden in the rain mists, but holding her station steadily, despite al the wind’s and sea’s spiteful efforts to separate the two vessels.

  The whole manoeuvre had been performed with an expertise which made it seem almost casual.

  ‘Dad’s carried a line across,’ Peter said proudly, and Chantelle, looking down, saw that a delicate white nylon thread was being hove in by two seamen on the tanker’s quarter-deck, while from the tug’s fire-control tower a canvas bosun’s chair was being winched across.

  The elevator doors slid open with a whine and Nicholas Berg strode on to the tanker’s bridge. His oilskins still ran with rainwater that splattered on to the deck at his feet.

  ‘Dad!’ Peter ran to meet him and Nicholas stooped and embraced him fiercely before straightening; with one arm still about his son’s shoulders, he confronted Chantelle and Duncan Elexander.

  ‘ I hope both of you are satisfied now,’ he said quietly, ’but I for one don’t rate our chances of saving this ship very highly, so I’m taking off everybody who is not needed on board to handle her.’

  ‘Your tug,’ burst out Duncan, ‘you’ve got 22,000 horse-power, and can-‘

  ‘There is a hurricane on its way,’ said Nicholas coldly, and he shot a out at the roaring night. ‘This is just the overture.’ He turned back to Randle. ‘How many men do you want to keep on board?’

  Randle thought a moment. ‘Myself, a helmsman, and five seamen to handle the tow-lines and work the ship.’ He paused and then went on. ‘And the pump-room personnel to control the cargo.’

  ‘You will act as helmsman, I will control the pump-room, and I’ll need only three seamen. Get me volunteers,’ Nicholas decided. ‘Send everyone else off.’

  ‘Sir,’ Randle began to protest.

  ‘May I remind you, Captain, that I am salvage master, my authority now supersedes yours.’ Nicholas dis not wait for a reply. ‘Chantelle,’ he picked her out, ‘take Peter down to the quarter-deck. ‘You’ll go across first.’

  ‘Listen here, Berg,’ Duncan could no longer contain himself, ‘I insist you pass the towing cable, This ship is in danger.’

  ‘Get down there with them,’ Nicholas snapped, ‘I’ll decide the procedures.’

  ‘Do as he says, darling,’ Chantelle smiled up at her husband vindictively. ‘You’ve lost. Nicholas is the only winner now.’

  ‘Shut up, damn you,’ Duncan hissed at her.

  ‘Get down to the afterdeck,’ Nicholas’ voice cracked like breaking ice.

  ‘I’m staying on board this ship,’ said Duncan abruptly. ‘It’s my responsibility. I said I’d see it out and by God I will. I am going to be here to make sure you do your job, Berg.’

  Nicholas checked himself, studied him for a long moment, and then smiled mirthlessly.

  ‘Nobody ever called you a coward,’ he nodded reluctantly. ‘Other things - but not a coward. Stay if you will, we might need an extra hand,’ Then to Peter, ‘Come, my boy.’ And he led him towards the elevator.

  At the quarter-deck rail, Nicholas hugged the boy, holding him in his arms, their cheeks pressed tightly together, and drawing out the moment while the wind cannoned and thrummed about their heads.

  ‘I love you, Dad.’

  ‘And I love you, Peter, more than I can ever tell you but you must go now.’

  He broke the embrace and lifted the child into the deep canvas bucket of the bosun's chair, stepped back and windmilled his right arm. Immediately, the winch party in Warlock's upperworks swung him swiftly out into the gap between the two ships and the nylon cable seemed as fragile and insubstantial as a spider's thread.

  As the two ships rolled and dipped, so the line tightened and sagged, one moment dropping the white canvas bucket almost to the water level where the hungry waves snatched at it with cold green fangs, and the next, pulling the line up so tightly that it hummed with tension, threatening to snap and drop the child back into the sea, but at last it reached the tug and four pairs of strong hands lifted the boy clear. For one moment, he waved back at Nicholas and then he was hustled away, and the empty bosun's chair was coming back.

  Only then did Nicholas become aware that Chantelle was clinging to his arm and he looked down into her face. Her eyelashes were dewed and stuck together with the flying raindrops. Her face ran with wetness and she seemed very small and childlike under the bulky oilskins and life-jacket. She was as beautiful as she had ever been but her eyes were huge and darkly troubled.
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  ‘Nicholas, I've always needed you,’ she husked. ‘But never as I need you now.’

  Her existence was being blown away on the wind, and she was afraid.

  ‘You and this ship are all I have left.

  ‘No, only the ship,’ he said brusquely, and he was amazed that the spell was broken. That soft area of his soul which she had been able to touch so unerringly was now armoured against her. With a sudden surge of relief, he realized he was free of her, for ever. It was over; here in the storm, he was free at last.

  She sensed for the fear in her eyes changed to real terror.

  ‘Nicholas, you cannot desert me now. Oh Nicholas, what will become of me without you and Christy Marine?’

  ‘I don't know,’ he told her quietly, and caught the bosun's chair as it came in over Golden Dawn's rail. He lifted her as easily as he had lifted his son and placed her in the canvas bucket.

  ‘And to tell you the truth, Chantelle, I don't really care,’ he said, and stepping back, he windmilled his right arm. The chair swooped out across the narrow water, swinging like a pendulum in the wind. Chantelle shouted something at him but Nicholas had turned away, and was already going aft in a lurching run to where the three volunteers were waiting.

  He saw at a glance that they were big, powerful, competent-looking men.

  Quickly Nicholas checked their equipment, from the thick leather gauntlets to the bolt cutters and jemmy bars for handling heavy cable.

  ‘You'll do,’ he said. ‘We will use the bosun's tackle to bring across a messenger from the tug - just as soon as the last man leaves this ship.’

  Working with men to whom the task was unfamiliar, and in rapidly deteriorating conditions of sea and weather, it took almost another hour before they had the main cable across from Warlock secured by its thick nylon spring to the tanker's stern bollards - yet the time had passed so swiftly for Nicholas that when he stood back and glanced at his watch, he was shocked. Before this wind they must have been going down very fast on the land. He staggered into the tanker's stern quarters, and left a trail of sea water down the passageway to the elevators.