Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  The shear control was in the control box halfway back along the tank deck, and at that moment the nearest seaman was two hundred yards from it.

  Nicholas could see him staggering wildly back along the twisting, juddering catwalk. Clearly he realized the danger, but his haste was fatal, for as he jumped from the catwalk, the deck opened under him, gaping open like the jaws of a steel monster and the seaman fell through, waist deep, into the opening between two moving plates, then as he squirmed feebly, the next lurch of the ship's hull closed the plates, sliding them across each other like the blades of a pair of scissors.

  The man shrieked once and a wave burst over the deck, smothering his mutilated body in cold, green water. When it poured back over the ship’s side there was no sign of the man, the deck was washed glisteningly clean.

  Nicholas reached the same point in the deck, judged the gaping and closing movement of the steel plate and the next rush of sea coming on board, before he leapt across the deadly gap.

  He reached the control box, and slid back the hatch, pressing himself into the tiny steel cubicle as he unlocked the red lid that housed the shear button. He hit the button with the heel of his hand.

  The four heavy chains of the tandem tow lay between the electrodes of the shear mechanism. With a gross surge of power from the ship's generators and a flash of blue electric flame, the thick steel links sheared as cleanly as cheese under the cutting wire - and, half a mile away, Sea Witch felt the release and pounded ahead under the full thrust of her propellers taking with her the forward starboard tank still held on main tow.

  Nicholas paused in the opening of the control cubicle, hanging on to the sill for support and he stared down at the single remaining tank, still caught inextricably in the tangled moving forest of Golden Dawn's twisting, contorting hull. It was as though an invisible giant had taken the Eiffel Tower at each end and was bending it across his knee.

  Suddenly there was a sharp chemical stink in the air, and Nicholas gagged on it. The stink of crude petroleum oil gushing from the ruptured tank.

  ‘Nicholas! Nicholas!’ The radio set slung over his shoulder squawked, and he lifted it to his lips without taking his eyes from the Golden Dawn's terrible death throes.

  ‘Go ahead, Jules.’

  ‘Nicholas, I am turning to pick you up.’

  ‘You can't turn, not with that tow.’

  ‘I will put my bows against the starboard quarterdeck rail, directly under the forward wing of the bridge. Be ready to jump aboard.’

  ‘Jules, you are out of your head!’

  ‘I have been that way for fifty years,’ Jules agreed amiably. ‘Be ready.’

  'Jules, drop your tow first,’ Nicholas pleaded. It would be almost impossible to manoeuvre the Sea Witch with that monstrous dead weight hanging on her tail. ‘Drop tow. We can pick up again later.’

  ‘You teach your grandfather to break eggs,’ Jules blithely mangled the old saying, giving it a sinister twist.

  ‘Listen Jules, the No. 4 tank has ruptured. I want you to shut down for fire. Do you understand? Full fire shut down. Once I am aboard, we will put a rocket into her and burn off cargo.’

  ‘I hear you, Nicholas, but I wish I had not.’

  Nicholas left the control cubicle, jumped the gaping, chewing gap in the decking and scrambled up the steel ladder on to the central catwalk.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the endlessly slippery grey wall of racing cloud and wind; its menace was overpowering, so that for a moment he faltered before forcing himself into running back along the catwalk towards the tanker's stern tower half a mile ahead.

  The single remaining seaman was on the catwalk a hundred yards ahead of him, pounding determinedly back towards the pick-up point. He also had heard Jules Levoisin's last transmission.

  A quarter of a mile across the roiling, leaping waters, Jules Levoisin was bringing Sea Witch around. At another time Nicholas would have been impressed by the consummate skill with which the little Frenchman was handling his ship and its burdensome tow, but now there was time and energy for one thing only.

  The air stank. The heavy fumes of crude oil burned Nicholas’ pumping lungs, and constricted his throat. He coughed and gasped as he ran, the taste and reek of it coated his tongue and seared his nostrils.

  Below the catwalk, the bloated pod-tank was punctured in a hundred places by the steel lances of the disintegrating hull, pinched and torn by moving steel girders, and the dark red oil spurted and dribbled and oozed from it like the blood from the carcass of a mortally wounded poisonous dragon.

  Nicholas reached the stern tower, barged in through the storm doors to the lowest deck and reached the pump control room.

  Duncan Alexander turned to him, as he entered, his face swollen and bruised where Nicholas had beaten him.

  ‘We are abandoning now,’ said Nicholas. Sea Witch is taking us off.’

  ‘I hated you from that very first day,’ Duncan was very calm, very controlled, his voice even, deep and cultured. Did you know that?’

  ‘There's no time for that now.’ Nicholas grabbed his arm, and Duncan followed him readily into the passageway.

  ‘That's what the game is all about, isn't it, Nicholas, power and wealth and women - that's the game we played.’

  Nicholas was barely listening. They were out on to the quarter-deck, standing at its starboard rail, below the bridge, the pick-up point that Jules had stipulated. Sea Witch was turning in, only five hundred yards out, and Nicholas had time now to watch Jules handle his ship.

  He was running out the heavy tow-cable on free spool, deliberately letting a long bight of it form between the tug and its enormous whale-like burden, and he was using the slack in the cable to cut in towards Golden Dawn's battered, sagging hulk. He would be alongside for the pickup in less than a minute.

  ‘That was the game we played, you and I,’ Duncan was still talking calmly. ‘Power and wealth and women-‘

  Below them Golden Dawn poured her substance into the sea in a slick, stinking flood. The waves, battering against her side, churned the oil to a thick filthy emulsion, and it was spreading away across the surface, bleeding its deadly poison into the Gulf Stream to broadcast it to the entire ocean.

  ‘I won,’ Duncan went on reasonably. ‘I won it all, every time –‘ He was groping in his pockets, but Nicholas hardly heard him, was not watching him. ‘- until now.’

  Duncan took one of the self-igniting signal flares from his pocket and held it against his chest with both hands, slipping his index finger through the metal ring of the igniter tab.

  ‘And yet I win this one also, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Game, set and match.’ And he pulled the tab on the flare with a sharp jerk, and stepped back, holding it aloft.

  It spluttered once and then burst into brilliant sparkling red flame, white phosphorescent smoke billowing from it.

  Now at last Nicholas turned to face him, and for a moment he was too appalled to move. Then he lunged for Duncan's raised hand that held the burning flare, but Duncan was too fast for him to reach it.

  He whirled and threw the flame in a high spluttering arc, out over the leaking, stinking tank-deck.

  It struck the steel tank and bounced once, and then rolled down the canted oil-coated plating.

  Nicholas stood paralysed at the rail staring down at it. He expected a violent explosion, but nothing happened, the flare rolled innocently across the deck, burning with its pretty red twinkling light.

  ‘It's not burning,’ Duncan cried. ‘Why doesn't it burn?’

  Of course, the gas was only explosive in a confined space, and it needed spark, Out here in the open air the oil had a very high flashpoint, it must be heated to release its volatiles.

  The flare caught in the scuppers and fizzled in a black pool of crude, and only then the crude caught. It caught with a red, slow, sulky flame that spread quickly but not explosively over the entire deck, and instantly, thick billows of dark smoke rose in a dense choking cloud.
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br />   Below where Nicholas stood, the Sea Witch thrust her bows in and touched them against the tanker's side. The seaman beside Nicholas jumped and landed neatly on the tug's bows, then raced back along Sea Witch's deck.

  ‘Nicholas,’ Jules voice thundered over the loudhailer. ‘Jump, Nicholas.

  Nicholas spun back to the rail and poised himself to jump.

  Duncan caught him from behind, whipping one arm around his throat, and pulling him backwards away from the rail.

  ‘No,’ Duncan shouted. ‘You're staying my friend. You are not going anywhere. You are staying here with me.’

  A greasy wave of black choking smoke engulfed them, and Jules’ magnified voice roared in Nicholas’ ears.

  ‘Nicholas, I cannot hold her here. Jump, quickly, jump!’

  Duncan had him off-balance, dragging him backwards, away from the ship's side, and suddenly Nicholas knew what he must do.

  Instead of resisting Duncan's arm, he hurled himself backwards and they crashed together into the superstructure - but Duncan bore the combined weight of both their bodies.

  His armlock around the throat relaxed slightly and Nicholas drove his elbow into Duncan's side below the ribs, then wrenched his body forward from the waist, reached between his own braced legs and caught Duncan's ankles. He straightened up again, dragging Duncan off his feet and the same instant dropped backwards with his full weight on to the deck.

  Duncan gasped and his arm fell away, as Nicholas bounced to his feet again, choking in the greasy billows of smoke, and he reached the ship's side.

  Below him, the gap between Sea Witch's bows and the tanker's side was rapidly widening and the thrust of the sea and the drag of the tug pulled them apart.

  Nicholas vaulted on to the rail, poised for an instant and then jumped. He struck the deck and his teeth cracked together with the impact; his injured leg gave under him and he rolled once, then he was up on his hands and knees.

  He looked up at Golden Dawn. She was completely enveloped now in the boiling column of black smoke. As the flames heated the leaking crude, so it burned more readily. The bank of smoke was shot through now with the satanic crimson of high, hot flame.

  As Sea Witch sheered desperately away, the first rush of the storm hit them, and for a moment it smeared the smoke away, exposing the tanker's high quarter-deck.

  Duncan Alexander stood at the rail above the roaring holocaust of the tank-deck. He stood with his arms extended, and he was burning, his clothing burned fiercely and his hair was a bright torch of flame. He stood like a ritual cross, outlined in fire, and then slowly he seemed to shrivel and he toppled forward over the rail into the bubbling, spurting, burning cargo of the monstrous ship that he had built - and the black smoke closed over him like a funeral cloak.

  As the crude oil escaping from the pierced pod tank fed the flames, so the heat built up swiftly, still sufficient to consume only the volatile aromatic spirits which constituted less than half the bulk of the cargo.

  The heavy carbon elements, not yet hot enough to burn, boiled off in that solid black column of smoke, and as the returning winds of the hurricane raced over the Golden Dawn once more, so that filthy pall was mixed with air and lifted into the cloud bank of the storm, rising first a thousand, then ten, then twenty thousand feet above the surface of the ocean.

  And still Golden Dawn burned, and the temperatures of the gas and oil mixture trapped in her hull rocketed steeply. Steel glowed red, then brilliant white, ran like molten wax, and then like water - and suddenly the flashpoint of heavy carbon smoke in a mixture of air and water vapour was reached in the womb of this mighty furnace.

  Golden Dawn and her entire cargo turned into a fireball.

  The steel and glass and metal of her hull disappeared in an instantaneous explosive combustion that released temperatures like those upon the surface of the sun. Her cargo, a quarter of a million tons of it, burned in an instant, releasing a white blooming rose of pure heat so fierce that it shot up into the upper stratosphere and consumed the billowing pall of its own hydrocarbon gas and smoke.

  The very air burst into flame, the surface of the sea flamed in that white fireball of heat and even the clouds of smoke burned as the oxygen and hydrocarbon they contained exploded.

  Once an entire city had been subjected to this phenomena of fireball, when stone and earth and air had exploded, and five thousand German citizens of the city of Cologne had been vaporized, and that vapour burned in the heat of its own release.

  But this fireball was spawned by a quarter of a million tons of volatile liquids.

  ‘Can't you get us further away?’ Nicholas shouted above the thunder of the hurricane. His mouth was only inches from Jules Levoisin's ear.

  They were standing side by side, hanging from the overhead railing that gave purchase on this wildly pitching deck.

  ‘If I open the taps I will part the tow wire,’ Jules shouted back.

  Sea Witch was alternately standing on her nose and then her tail. There was no forward view from the bridge, only green washes of sea water and banks of spray.

  The full force of the hurricane was on them once more, and a glance at the radarscope showed the glowing image of Golden Dawn's crippled and bleeding hull only half a mile astern.

  Suddenly the glass of the windows was obscured by an impenetrable blackness, and the light in Sea Witch's navigation bridge was reduced to only the glow of her fire-lights and the electronic instruments of her control console.

  Jules Levoisin turned his face to Nicholas, his plump features haunted by green shadows in the gloom.

  ‘Smoke bank,’ Nicholas shouted an explanation. There was no reek of the filthy hydrocarbon in the bridge, for Sea Witch was shut down for fire drill, all her ports and ventilators sealed, her internal air-conditioning on a closed circuit, the air being scrubbed and recharged with oxygen by the big carrier until above the main engine room. ‘We are directly downwind of the Golden Dawn.’

  A fiercer rush of the hurricane winds laid Sea Witch over on her side, the lee rail deep under the racing green sea, and held her there, unable to rise against the careless might of the storm for many minutes. Her crew hung desperately from any hand hold, the irksome burden of her tow helping to drag her down further; the propellers found no grip in the air, and her engines screamed in anguish.

  But Sea Witch had been built to live in any sea, and the moment the wind hesitated, she fought off the water that had come aboard and began to swing back.

  ‘Where is Warlock?’ Jules bellowed anxiously. The danger of collision preyed upon him constantly, two ships and their elephantine tows manoeuvring closely in confined hurricane waters was nightmare on top of nightmare.

  ‘Ten miles east of us.’ Nicholas picked the other tug's image out of the trash on the radarscope. ‘They had a start, ahead of the wind-‘

  He would have gone on, but the boiling bank of hydrocarbon smoke that surrounded Sea Witch turned to fierce white light, a light that blinded every man on the bridge as though a photograph flashlight had been fired in his face.

  ‘Fireball!’ Nicholas shouted, and, completely blinded, reached for the remote controls of the water cannons seventy feet above the bridge on Sea Witch's fire-control tower.

  Minutes before, he had aligned the four water cannons, training them down at their maximum angle of depression, so now as he locked down the multiple triggers, Sea Witch deluged herself in a pounding cascade of sea water.

  Sea Witch was caught in a furnace of burning air, and despite the torrents of water she spewed over herself, her paintwork was burned away in instantaneous combustion so fierce that it consumed its own smoke, and almost instantly the bare scorched metal of her exposed upperworks began to glow with heat.

  The heat was so savage that it struck through the insulated hull, through the double glazing of the two-inch armoured glass of her bridge windows, scorching and frizzling away Nicholas eyelashes and blistering his lips as he lifted his face to it.

  The glass of the
bridge windows wavered and swam as they began to melt - and then abruptly there was no more oxygen. The fireball had extinguished itself, consumed everything in its twenty seconds of life, everything from sea level to thirty thousand feet above it, a brief and devastating orgasm of destruction.

  It left a vacuum, a weak spot in the earth's thin skin of air, it formed another low pressure system smaller, but much more intense, and more hungry to be filled than the eye of hurricane Lorna itself.

  It literally tore the guts out of that great revolving storm, setting up counter winds and a vortex within the established system that ripped it apart.

  New gales blew from every point about the fireball's vacuum, swiftly beginning their own dervish spirals and twenty miles short of the mainland of Florida, hurricane Lorna checked her mindless, blundering charge, fell in upon herself and disintegrated into fifty different willy-nilly squalls and whirlpools of air that collided and split again, slowly degenerating into nothingness.

  On a morning in April in Galveston roads, the salvage tug Sea Witch dropped off tow to four smaller harbour tugs who would take the Golden Dawn No. 3 Pod tank up the narrows to the Orient Amex discharge installation below Houston.

  Her sister ship Warlock, Captain David Allen Commanding, had dropped off his tandem tow of No. 1 and No. 2 pod tanks to the same tugs forty-eight hours previously.

  Between the two ships, they had made good salvage under Lloyd's Open Form of three-quarters of a million tons of crude petroleum valued at $85-5 U.S. a ton. To the prize would be added the value of the three tanks themselves - not less than sixty-five million dollars all told, Nicholas calculated, and he owned both ships and the full share of the salvage award. He had not sold to the Shiekhs yet, though for every day of the tow from Florida Straites to Texas there had been frantic telex messages from James Teacher in London. The Sheikhs were desperate to sign now, but Nicholas would let them wait a little longer.

  Nicholas stood on the open wing of Sea Witch's bridge and watched the four smaller harbour tugs bustling importantly about their ungainly charge.