Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (14 page)

Still closer, he could see how the heavy steel hull, half filled with
water, had burrowed itself into the yielding shingle. She would stick
like toffee to a baby's blanket.

Then he looked at the ice, it was not only brash and pancake ice, but
there were big chunks, bergie bits, from rotten and weathered icebergs,
which the wind had driven into the bay, like a sheep dog with its flock.

The plunging temperatures had welded this mass of ice into a whole; like
a monstrous octopus, it was wrapping thick glistening tentacles around
Adventurer's stern. The ice had not yet had sufficient time to become
impenetrable, and Warlock's bows were ice-strengthened for just such an
emergency - yet Nick knew enough not to underestimate the hardness of
ice. White ice is soft ice was the old adage, and yet here there were
big lumps and hummocks of green and striated glacial ice in the mass,
like fat plums in a pudding, any one of which could punch a hole through
Warlock's hull.

Nick grimaced at the thought of having to send Jules Levoisin a Mayday.

He spoke to the helmsman quietly.
‘
Starboard five
-
midships
,’
lining
Warlock up for a fracture-line in the ice pack. It was vital to come in
at a right angle, to take the ice fully on the stern; a glancing blow
could throw the bows off line and bring the vulnerable hull in contact
with razor ice.

‘
Stand by, engine room
,’
he alerted them, and Warlock bore down on the ice
at a full ten knots and Nick judged the moment of impact finely. Half a
ship's length clear, he gave a crisp order.

‘
Both half back.
’

Warlock checked, going up on to the ice as she
decelerated, but still with a horrid rasping roar that echoed through
the ship. Her bows rose, riding up over the ice. It gave with a
rending crackle, huge slabs of ice up-ending and tumbling together.

‘
Both full back.
’

The huge twin propellers changed their pitch smoothly
into reverse thrust, and the wash boiled into the broken ice, sweeping
it clear, as Warlock drew back into open water and Nick steadied her and
lined her up again.

‘
Both ahead full.
’
Warlock charged forward, checking at the last moment,
and again thick slabs of white ice broke away, and grated along the
ship's side. Nick swung her stern first starboard then port, deftly
using the twin screws to wash the broken ice free, then he pulled
Warlock out and lined up again.

Butting and smashing and pivoting, Warlock worked her way deeper into
the bay, opening a spreading web of cracks across the white sheet of
ice.

David Allen was breathless, as he burst on to the bridge.

‘
All gear checked and ready, sir.
’

‘
Take her
,’
said Nick.
‘
She's broken it
up now - just keep it stirred up.
’
He wanted to add a warning that the
big variable-pitch propellers were Warlock's most vulnerable parts, but
he had a high enough opinion now of his Mate's ability, so he went on
instead,
‘
I'm going down now to kit
up
.
’

Vin Baker was in the aft salvage hold ahead of him, he had already half
finished the tray of rich food and Angel hovered over him, but, as Nick
came down the steel ladder, he lifted the cover off another steaming
tray.

‘
It's good
,’
said Nick, although he could hardly force himself to swallow.
The nerves in his stomach were bunched up too tightly. Yet food was one
of the best defences against the cold.

‘
Samantha wants to talk to you, skip.
’

‘
Who the hell is Samantha?
’

‘
The
girl - she wants to thank you.
’

‘
Use your head, Angel, can't you see I
have other things on my mind
?’

Nick was already pulling on the rubber
immersion suit over a full-length woollen undersuit. He needed the
assistance of a seaman to enter the opening in the chest of the suit.

He had already forgotten about the girl as they closed the chest opening
of the suit with a double ring seal, and then over the watertight
bootees and mittens went another full suit of polyurethane.
Nick and Vin Baker looked like a pair of fat Michelin men, as their
dressers helped them into the full helmets, with wrap-around visors,
built-in radio microphones and breathing valves.

‘
Okay, Chief?
’
Nick asked, and Vin Baker's voice squawked too loudly into
his headphones.

‘
Clear to roll.
’

Nick adjusted the volume, and then shrugged into the
oxygen rebreathing set. They were not going deeper than thirty feet, so
Nick had decided to use oxygen rather than the bulky steel
compressed-air cylinders.

‘
Let's go
,’
he said, and waddled to the ladder.

The Zodiac sixteen-foot inflatable dinghy swung overboard with the four
of them in it, two divers and two picked seamen to handle the boat. Vin
pushed one of them aside and primed the outboard himself.

‘
Come on, beauty
,’
he told it sternly, and the big Johnson Seahorse fired
at the first kick. Gingerly, they began to feel their way through an
open lead in the ice, with the two seamen poling away small sharp pieces
that would have ripped the fabric of the Zodiac.

In Nick's radio headset, David Allen's voice spoke suddenly.

‘
Captain, this is the First Officer. Barometric pressure is
1021
- it
looks like it's going through the roof.
’

The pressure was bouncing, as
Nick had predicted. What goes up, must come down - and the higher she
goes, the lower she falls.

Jules Levoisin had warned him it was going to be a screamer.

‘
Did you read the last met from Gough Island?
’

‘
They have 1005 falling, and the wind at 320
^o
and thirty-five knots.
’

‘
Lovely
,’
said Nick.
‘
We've got a big blow coming.
’
And through the visor
of his helmet he looked up at the pale and beautiful sun. It was not
bright enough to pain the eye, and now it wore a fine golden halo like
the head of a saint in a medieval painting.

‘
Skipper, this is as close as we can get,
’
Vin Baker told him, and slipped
the motor into neutral. The Zodiac coasted gently into a small open
pool in the ice-pack, fifty yards from Golden Adventurers stern.

A solid sheet of compacted ice separated them, and Nick studied it
carefully. He had not taken the chance of working Warlock in closer
until he could get a look at the bottom here. He wanted to know what
depth of water he had to manoeuvre in, and if there were hidden snags,
jagged rock to rip through the Warlock's hull, or flat shingle on which
he could risk a bump.

He wanted to know the slope of the bottom, and if there was good holding
for his ground-tackle, but most of all, he wanted to inspect the
underwater damage to Golden Adventurer's hull.

‘
Okay, Chief?
’
he asked, and Vin Baker grinned at him through the visor.

‘
Hey, I just remembered - my mommy told me not to get my feet wet.
I'm going home.
’

Nick knew just how he felt. There was thick sheet ice
between them and Adventurer, they had to go down and swim below it.
God alone knew what currents were running under the ice, and what
visibility was like down there.
A man in trouble could not surface immediately, but must find his way
back to open water. Nick felt a claustrophobic tightening of his belly
muscles, and he worked swiftly, checking out his gear, cracking the
valve on his oxygen tank to inflate the breathing bag, checking the
compass and Rolex Oyster on his wrist and clipping his buddy line on to
the Zodiac, a line to return along, like Theseus in the labyrinth of the
Minotaur.

‘
Let's go
,’
he said, and flipped backwards into the water.

The cold struck through the multiple layers of rubber and cloth and
p
olyurethane almost instantly, and Nick waited only for the Chief
Engineer to break through the surface beside him in a cloud of swirling
silver bubbles.

‘
God
!’
Vin Baker's voice was distorted by the earphones,
‘
it's cold
enough to crack the gooseberries off a plaster saint.
’
Paying out the
line behind him, Nick sank down into the hazy green depths, looking for
bottom. It came up dimly, heavy shingle and pebble, and he checked his
depth gauge - almost six fathoms - and he moved in towards the beach.

The light from the surface was filtered through thick ice, green and
ghostly in the icy depths, and Nick felt unreasonable panic stirring
deep in him. He tried to thrust it aside and concentrate on the job,
but it flickered there, ready to burst into flame.

There was a current working under the ice, churning the sediment so that
the visibility was further reduced, and they had to fi
n
hard to make
headway across the bottom, always with the hostile ceiling of sombre
green ice above them, cutting them off from the real world.

Suddenly the Golden Adventurer's hull loomed ahead of them, the twin
propellers glinting like gigantic bronze wings in the gloom.

They moved in within arm Is length of the steel hull and swam slowly
along it. It was like flying along the outer wall of a tall apartment
block, a sheer cliff of riveted steel plate - but the hull was moving.

The Golden Adventurer was hoggmg on the bottom, the stern dipping and
swaying to the pulse of the sea, the heaving ground-swell that came in
under the ice; her stern bumped heavily on the pebbly bottom, like a
great hammer beating time to the ocean.

Nick knew that she was settling herself in. Every hour now was making
his task more difficult and he drove harder with his swim fins, pulling
slightly ahead of Vin Baker. He knew exactly where to look for the
damage.
Reilly had reported it in minute detail to Christy Marine, but he came
across it without warning.

It looked as though a monstrous axe had been swung horizontally at the
hull, a clean slash, the shape of an elongated teardrop. The metal
around it had been depressed, and the pain
t
smeared away so that the
steel gleamed as though it had been scoured and polished.

At its widest, the lips of the fifteen-foot rent gaped open by three
feet or a little more, and it breathed like a living mouth - for the
force of the ground-swell pushing into the gap built up pressure within
the hull, then as the swell subsided the trapped water was forcibly
expelled, sucking in and out with tremendous pressure.

‘
It's a clean hole
,’
Vin Baker's voice squawked harshly.
‘
But it's too long to pump with cement.
’

He was right, of course, Nick
had seen that at once.
Liquid cement would not plug that wicked gash, and anyway, there wasn't
time to use cement, not with weather coming. An idea began forming in
his mind.