Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (21 page)

The high-pressure system which had brought that ominously calm and
silken weather to Cape Alarm, had bounc
ed the pressure right up to 103
5
millibars, while the great depression which pursued it so closely and
swiftly had a centre pressure as low as 985 millibars. Such a sharp
contrast meant that the winds along the pressure-gradient were
ferocious.

The depression itself was almost fifteen hundred miles across its
circumference, and it reached up to the high troposphere, thirty
thousand feet above the level of the sea. The mighty winds it contained
reached right off the
maxi
mum of the Beaufort scale of force twelve, gusting
120 miles an hour and more. They roared unfettered upon a terrible sea,
unchecked by the bulwark of any land mass,
n
othing in their path, but the sudden jagged barrier of Cape Alarm.

While Nicholas Berg slept the deathlike sleep of utter exhaustion, and
Beauty Baker tended his machines, driving them to their limits in an
effort to pump Golden Adventurer free of her burden of salt water, the
storm rushed down upon them.

When her knock was unanswered, Samantha stood uncertainly, balancing the
heavy tray against the Warlock's extravagant action as she rode the
rising swells at the entrance to the bay.

Her uncertainty lasted not more than three seconds, for she was a lady
given to swift decisions. She tried the door
-
latch and when it turned,
she pushed it open slowly enough to warn anybody on the far side, and
stepped into the Captain's day cabin.

‘
He ordered food
,’
she justified her intrusion, and closed the door behind
her, glancing swiftly around the empty cabin. It had been furnished in
the high style of the old White Star liners. Real rosewood panelling
and the couch and chairs were in rich brown calf hide, polished and
buttoned, while the deck was carpeted in thick shaggy wool, the colour
of tropical forest leaves.

Samantha placed the tray on the table that ran below the starboard
portholes, and she called softly. There was no reply, and she stepped
to the open doorway into the night cabin.

A white terry robe lay in a heap in the centre of the deck, and she
thought for one disturbing moment that the body on the bed was naked,
but then she saw he wore a thin pair
o
f white silk boxer shorts.

‘
Captain Berg
,’
she called again, but softly enough not to disturb him,
and with a completely feminine gesture picked up the robe from the
floor, folded it and dropped it over a chair, moving forward at the same
time until she stood beside his bunk.

She felt a quick flare of concern when she saw the bruises which stood
out so vividly on the smooth pale skin, and concern turned to dismay
when she realized how he lay like a dead man, his legs trailing over the
edge of the bunk and his body twisted awkwardly, one arm thrown back
over his shoulder and his head lolling from side to side as Warlock
rolled.

She reached out quickly and touched his cheek, experiencing a lift of
real relief as she felt the warmth of his flesh and saw his eyelids
quiver at her touch.

Gently she lifted his legs and he rolled easily on to his side, exposing
the sickening abrasion that wrapped itself angrily across back and
shoulder. She touched it with a light exploring fingertip and knew that
it needed attention, but she sensed that rest was what he needed more.

She stood back and for long seconds gave herself over to the pleasure of
looking at him. His body was fined down, he carried no fat on his belly
or flanks; clearly she could see the rack of his ribs below the skin,
and the muscles of his arms and legs were smooth but well-defined, a
body that had been cared for and honed by hard exercise. Yet there was
a certain denseness to it, that thickening of shoulder and neck, and the
distinctive hair patterns of the mature
man.

It might not have the grace and
delicacy of the boys she had known, yet it was more powerful than that
of even the strongest of the young men who had until then filled her
world. She thought of one of them whom she had believed she loved. They
had spent two months in Tahiti together on the same field expedition.
She had surfed with him, danced and drunk wine, worked and slept sixty
consecutive days and nights with him; in the same period they had become
engaged to marry, and had argued, and parted, with surprisingly little
regret on her pa
rt
- but he had had the most beautiful tanned and
sculptured body she had ever known. Now, looking at the sleeping figure
on the bunk, she knew that even he would not have been able to match
this man in physical determination and strength.

Angel had been right. It was the power that attracted her so strongly.
The powerful, rangy body with the dark coarse hair covering his chest
and exploding in flak bursts in his armpits - this, together with the
power of his presence.

She had never known a man like this, he filled her with a sense of awe.
It was not only the legend that surrounded him, nor the formidable list
of his accomplishments that Angel had recounted for her, nor yet was it
only the physical strength which he had just demonstrated while the
entire crew of Warlock, she among them, had watched and listened avidly
over the V
HF
relay. She leaned over him again, and she saw that even in
repose, his jawline was hard and uncompromising, and the little creases
and lines and marks that life had chiselled into his face, around the
eyes
,
at the corners of the mouth, heightened the effect of power and
determination, the face of a man who dictated his own terms to life.

She wanted him, Angel was right, oh God, how she wanted him! They said
there was no love at first sight
-
they had to be mad.

She turned away and unfolded the eiderdown from the foot of the bunk,
spreading it over him, and then once again she stooped and gently lifted
the fall of thick dark hair from his forehead, smoothing it back with a
maternally protective gesture.

Although he had slept on while she lifted and covered him, strangely
this lightest of touches brought him to the edge of consciousness and he
sighed and twisted, then whispered hoarsely,
‘
Chantelle, is that you?
’

Samantha recoiled at the bitter sharp pang of jealousy with which
another woman's name stabbed her. She turned away and left him, but in
the day cabin she paused again beside his desk.

There were a few small personal items thrown carelessly on the
leather-bound blotter, a gold money clip holding a mixed sheath of
currency notes, five pounds sterling, fifty US dollars, Deutschmarks and
francs, a gold Rolex Oyster perpetual watch, a gold Dunhill lighter with
a single white diamond set in it, and a billfold of the smoothest finest
calf leather. They described clearly the man who owned them and,
feeling like a thief, she picked up the billfold and opened it.

There were a dozen cards in their little plastic envelopes, American
Express, Diners, Bank American, Carte Blanche, Hertz No. 1, Pan Am VIP
and the rest. But opposite them was a colour photograph. Three people:
a man, Nicholas in a cable-stitch jersey, his face bronzed, his hair
windruffled; a small boy in a yachting jacket with a curly mop of hair
and solemn eyes above a smiling mouth - and a woman. She was probably
one of the most beautiful women Samantha had ever seen, and she closed
the billfold, replaced it carefully, and quietly left the cabin.

David Allen called the Captain's suite for three minutes without an
answer, slapping his open palm on the mahogany chart table with
impatience and staring through the navigation windows at the spectacle
of a world gone mad.

For almost two hours, the wind had blown steadily from the north-west at
a little over thirty knots, and although the big humpy seas still
tumbled into the mouth of the bay, Warlock had ridden them easily, even
connected, as she was, to Golden Adventurer by the main tow-cable.

David had put a messenger over the
l
iner's stern, firing the nylon fine
from a rocket gun, and Baker's men had retrieved the fine and winched
across first the carrier wire and then the main cable itself.

Warlock had let the main cable be drawn out of her by Adventurer's
winches, slowly revolving off the great winch drums in the compartment
under the tug's stern deck, out through the cable ports below the after
navigation bridge where David stood controlling each inch of run and
play with light touches on the controls.

A good man could work that massive cable like a fly
-
fisherman playing a
big salmon in the turbulent water of a mountain torrent, letting it slip
against the clutch
-
plates, or run free, or recover slack, bringing it up
hard and fast under a pull of five hundred tons - or, in dire emergency,
he could hit the shear button, and snip through the flexible steel
fibre, instantaneously relinquishing the tow, possibly saving the tug
itself from being pulled under or being rushed by the vessel it was
towing.

It had taken an hour of delicate work, but now the tow was in place, a
double yoke made fast to Golden Adventurer's main deck bollards, one on
her starboard and one on her port stern quarters.

The yoke was Y-shaped, drooping over the high stern to join at the white
nylon spring, three times the thickness of a man
’
s thigh and with the
elasticity to absorb sudden shock which might have snapped rigid steel
cable. From the yoke connection, the single main cable looped back to
the tug.

David Allen was lying back a thousand yards from the shore, holding
enough strain on the tow-cable to prevent it sagging to touch and
possibly snag on the unknown bottom. He was holding his station with
gentle play on the pitch and power of the twin screws, and checking his
exact position against the electronic dials which gave him his speed
across the ground in both directions, accurate to within a foot a
minute.

It was all
nicely under control, and every time he glanced up at the
liner, the discharge of water still boiled from her pump outlets.

Half an hour previously, he had been unable to contain his impatience,
for he knew with a seaman's deep instinct what was coming down upon them
out of the dangerous quadrant of the wind. He had called Baker to ask
how the work on the liner was progressing. It had been a mistake.

‘
You've got nothing better to do than call me out of the engine room to
ask about my piles, and the F
A Cup final?
I'll tell you when I'm ready, believe me, sonny, I'll call you.
If you are bored, go down and give Angel a kiss, but for God's sake,
leave me alone.
’

Beauty Baker was working with two of his men in that
filthy, freezing steel box deep down in the liner's stern that housed
the emergency steering-gear. The rudder was right across at full port
lock. Unless he could get power on the steering machinery, she would be
almost unmanageable, once she was under tow, especially if she was
pulled off stern first. It was vital that the big ship was responding
to her helm when Warlock tried to haul her off
.

Baker cursed and cajoled
the greasy machinery, knocking loose a flap of thick white skin from his
knuckles when a spanner slipped, but working on grimly without even
bothering to lift the injury to his mouth to suck away the welling
blood. He let it drop on to the spanner and thicken into a sticky
jelly, swearing softly but viciously as he concentrated all his skills
on the obdurate steel mass of the steering gear. He knew every bit as
well as the First Officer what was coming down upon them.