Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (28 page)

She
thought about it.
‘
It could work
,’
she admitted.

‘
It will work
,’
he told her.
’
I've sold the idea to the Saudis already.
They are already building the dock and the dams.
We'll give them water at one hundredth the cost of us nuclear condensers
on sea water, and without the risk of radio-active contamination.
’
She
was absorbed with his vision, and he with hers. As they talked deep
into the long watches of the night, they drew closer in spirit only.

Although each of them treasured those shared hours, somehow neither
could bridge the narrow chasm between friendliness and real intimacy.
She was instinctively aware of his reserves, that he was a m
a
n who had
considered life and established his code by which to live it. She
guessed that he did nothing unless it was deeply felt, and that a casual
physical relationship would offer no attraction to him; she knew of the
turmoil to which his life had so recently been reduced, and that he was
pulling himself out of that by main strength, but that he was now wary
of further hurt. There was time, she told herself, plenty of time - but
Warlock bore steadily north by north-east, dragging her crippled ward up
through the roaring forties; those notorious winds treated her kindly
and she made good the six knots that Nick had hoped for.

On board Warlock, the attitude of the officers towards Samantha Silver
changed from fawning adulation
to wistful
respect. Every one of them
knew of the nightly ritual of the eight-to-midnight watch.

‘
Bloody cradle-snatcher!
’
groused Tim Graham.

‘
Mr. Graham, it is fortunate I did not hear that remark
,’
David Allen
warned him with glacial coldness - but they all resented Nicholas Berg,
it was unfair competition, yet they kept a new respectful distance from
the girl, not one of them daring to challenge the herd bull.

The time that Samantha had looked upon as endless was running out now,
and she closed her mind to it. Even when David Allen showed her the
fuzzy luminescence of the African continent on the extreme range of the
radar-screen, she pretended to herself that it would go on like this -
if not for ever, at least until something special happened.

During the long voyage up from Shackleton Bay, Samantha had streamed a
very fine-meshed net from Warlock's stern, collecting an incredible
variety of krill and plankton and other microscopic marine life. Angel
had grudgingly given her a small corner of his scullery in return for
her services as honorary assistant under-chef and unpaid waitress, and
she spent many absorbed hours there each day, identifying and preserving
her specimens.

She was working there when the helicopter came out to Warlock. She
looked up at the buffeting of the machine's rotors as they changed into
fine pitch for the landing on Warlock's high-deck, and she was tempted
to go up like every idle and curious hand on board, but she was in the
middle of staining a slide, and somehow she resented the encroachment on
this little island of her happiness. She worked on, but now her
pleasure was spoiled, and she cocked her head when she heard the roar of
the rotors as the helicopter rose from the deck again and she was left
with a sense of foreboding.

Angel came in from the deck, wiping his hands on his apron and he paused
in the doorway.

‘
You didn't tell me he was going, dearie.
’

‘
What do you mean?
’
Samantha looked up at him, startled.

‘
Your boyfriend, darling. Socks and toothbrush and all.
’
Angel watched
her shrewdly.
‘
Don't tell me he didn't even kiss you goodbye.
’
She
dropped the glass slide into the stainless steel sink and it snapped in
half. She was panting as she gripped the rail of the upper deck and
stared after the cumbersome yellow machine.

It flew low across the green wind-chopped sea, humpbacked and nose low,
still close enough to read the operating company's name
‘
COURT
LINE
’
emblazoned on its fuselage, but it dwindled swiftly towards the far blue
line of mountains.

Nick Berg sat in the jump seat between the two pilots of the big S. 58T
Sikorsky and looked ahead towards the flat silhouette of Table Mountain.
It was overlaid by a thick mattress of snowy cloud, at the
south-easterly wind swirled across its summit.

From their altitude of a mere thousand feet, there were still five big
tankers in sight, ploughing stolidly through the green sea on their
endless odyssey, seeming to be alien to their element not designed to
live in harmony with it, but to oppose every movement of the waters.
Even in this low sea, they wore thick garlands of white at their stubby
rounded bows, and Nick watched one of them dip suddenly and take spray
as high as her foremast. In any sort of blow, she would be like a pier
with pylons set on solid ground.

The seas would break right over her. It was not the way a ship should
be, and now he twisted in his seat and looked back.

Far behind them, Warlock was still visible. Even at this distance, and
despite the fact that she was dwarfed by her charge, her lines pleased
the seaman in him. She looked good, but that backward glance invoked a
pang of regret that he had been so stubbornly trying to ignore - and he
had a vivid image of green eyes and hair of platinum and gold.

His regret was spiced by the persistent notion that he had been
cowardly. He had left Warlock without being able to bring himself to
say goodbye to the girl, and he knew why he had done so. He would not
take the chance of making a fool of himself. He grimaced with distaste,
as he remembered her exact words,
‘
You really are old-fashioned, aren't
you?
’
There was something vaguely repulsive in a middle-aged man lusting
after young flesh - and he supposed he must now look upon himself as
middle-aged. In six months he would be forty years of age, and he did
not really expect to live to eighty. So he was in the middle of the
road.

He had always scorned those grey, lined, balding, unattractive little
men with big cigars, sitting in expensive restaurants with pretty young
girls beside them, the young thing pretending to hang on every
pearl-like word, while her eyes focused beyond his shoulder - on some
younger
man

But still, it had been cowardice. She had become a friend
during those weeks, and she could hardly have been aware of the emotions
that she had aroused in him during those long dark hours on Warlock's
bridge. She was not to blame for his unruly passions, in no way had she
encouraged him to believe that he was more than just an older man, not
even a father figure, but just someone with whom to pass an otherwise
empty hour. She had been as friendly and cheerful to everyone else on
board Warlock, from the Mate to the cook.

He really had owed her the common courtesy of a handshake and an
assurance of the pleasure he had taken from her company, but he had not
been certain he could restrict it to that.

He winced again as he imagined her horror as he blurted out some sort of
declaration, some proposal to prolong their relationship or alter its
structure into something more intimate, her disenchantment when she
realized that behind the facade of the mature and cultured man, he was
just as grimy an old lecher as the furtive drooling browsers in the
porno-shops of Times Square.

Let it go, he had decided. No matter that he was probably in better
physical shape now than he had been at twenty-five, to Dr. Samantha
Silver he was an old man and he had a frightening vision of an episode
from his own youth.

A woman, a friend of his mother's, had trapped the nineteen-year-old
Nicholas alone one rainy day in the old beach house at Martha's
Vineyard. He remembered his own revulsion at the sagging white flesh,
the wrinkles, the lines of strain across her belly and breasts, and the
oldness of her.

She would then have been a woman of forty, the same as he was now, and
he had done her the service she required out of some obligation of pity,
but afterwards he had scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled and he had
stood under the shower for almost an hour.

it was one of the cruel deceits of life that a
p
erson aged from the
outside. He had thought of himself in the fullness of his physical and
mental powers, especially now after bringing in Golden Adventurer. He
was ready for them to lead on the dragons and he would tear out their
jugulars with his bare hands - then she had called him an old-fashioned
thing, and he had realized that the sexual fantasy which was slowly
becoming an obsession must be associated with the male menopause, a
sorry symptom of the ageing process of which he had not been conscious
until then. He g
r
inned wryly at the thought.

The girl would probably hardly notice that he had left the ship, at the
worst might be a little piqued by
his lack
of manners, but in a week would have
forgotten his name.
As for himself, there was enough, and more than enough to fill the days
ahead, so that the image of a slim young body and that precious mane of
silver and gold would fade until it became the fairy tale it really was.

Resolutely he turned in the jump seat and looked ahead.
Always look ahead, there are never regrets in that direction.

They clattered in over False Bay, crossing the narrow isthmus of the
Cape Peninsula under the bulk of the cloud
-
capped mountain, from the
Indian Ocean to the Atlantic in under ten minutes.

He saw the gathering, like vultures at the lion kill, as the Sikorsky
lowered to her roost on the helipad within the main harbour area of
Table Bay.

As Nick jumped down, ducking instinctively under the still-turning
rotors, they surged forward, ignoring the efforts of the Courtline
dispatcher to keep the pad clear; they were led by a big red-faced man
with a scorched looking bald head and
the furry arms of a tame bear.

‘
Larry Fry, Mr. Berg,
’
he growled.
‘
You remember me?
’

‘
Hello, Larry.
’
He
was the local manager for Bach Wackie & Co, Nick's agents.

‘
I thought you might say a few words to the Press.
’
But the journalists
swarmed around Nick now, demanding, jostling each other, their cam
e
ras
firing flash bulbs.

Nick felt his irritation flare, and he needed a deep breath and a
conscious effort to control his anger.

‘
All right, lads and ladies.
’
He held up both hands, and grinned that
special boyish grin. They were doing a tough job, he reminded himself.
It couldn't be easy to be forced daily into the company of rich and
successful men, grabbing for ti
t
bits, and being grossly underpaid for
your efforts with the long-term expectation of ulcers and cirrhosis of
the liver.

‘
Play the game with me and I'll play it with you
,’
he promised, and
thought for a moment how it would be if they didn't want to speak with
him, how it would be if they didn't know who he was, and didn't care.