Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (34 page)

‘Nicholas,’
Jules shook his head in
admiration,
‘
you move too fast for me. I am an old man,
old-fashioned
-‘

‘
You're not old,
’
Samantha told him firmly.
‘
You're only just
in your prime.
’
And Jules threw up both hands theatrically.

‘
Now you have a pretty girl heaping flattery on my bowed grey head
,’
he
looked at Nicholas;
‘
is no trick too deceitful for you?
’

It was snowing
the next morning, a slow sparse sprinkling from a grey woollen sky, when
they drove into St Nazaire from the little seaside resort of La Baule
twenty-five kilometres up the Atlantic coast.

Jules had a small flat in one of the apartment blocks. It was a
convenient arrangement, for La Mouette, his command, was owned by a
Breton company and St Nazaire was her home port. It was a mere
twenty-minute drive before they made out the elegant arch of the
suspension bridge which crosses the estuarine mouth of the Loire River
at St Nazaire.

Jules drove through the narrow streets of that area of the docks just
below the bridge which comprises the sprawling ship-building yard of
Construction Navale Atlantique, one of the three largest ship-building
companies in Europe, The slipways for the larger vessels, the bulk
carriers and naval craft, faced directly on to the wide smooth reach of
the river; but the ways for the small vessels backed on to the inner
harbour.

So Jules parked the Citron at the security gates nearest the inner
harbour, and they walked through to where Charles Gras was waiting for
them in his offices overlooking the inner basin.

‘
Nicholas, it is good to see you again.
’
Gras was one of Atlantique's top
engineers, a tall stooped man with a pale face and lank black hair
that fell to his eyebrows, he had the sharp foxy Parisian features and
quick bright eyes that belied the morose unsmiling manner.

He and Nicholas had known each other many years, and they used the
familiar
‘
tu
’
form of address.

Charles Gras changed to heavily accented English when he was introduced
to Samantha, and back to French when he asked Nicholas,
‘
If I know you,
you will want to go directly to see your ship now, n'est-ce pas?
’

Sea
Witch stood high on her ways, and although she was an identical twin to
Warlock, she seemed almost twice her size with her underwater hull
exposed. Despite the fact that the superstructure was incomplete and
she was painted in the drab oxide red of marine primer, yet it was
impossible to disguise the symmetrically functional beauty of her lines.

Jules puffed, and muttered
‘
Bordello
’
and made remarks about 'Admiral Berg
and his battleship', but he could not hide the gleam in his eye as he
strutted about the uncompleted navigation bridge, or listened intently
as Charles Gras explained the electronic equipment and the other
refinements that made the ship so fast, efficient and manoeuvrable.

Nick realized that the two experts should be left alone now to convince
each other; it was clear that although this was their first meeting the
two of them had established immediate rapport.

‘
Come.
’
Nick quietly took Samantha's arm and they stepped carefully
around the scaffolding and loose equipment, picking their way through
groups of workmen to the upper deck.

The snow had stopped, but a razor of a wind snickered in from the
Atlantic. They found a sheltered corner, and Samantha pressed close to
Nick, snuggling into the circle of his arm.

High on her ways, Sea Witch gave them a sweeping view, through the
forest of construction cranes, over the roofs of the warehouses and
offices to the river slipways where the keels of the truly big hulls
were laid down.

‘
You spoke about Golden Dawn,
’
Nick said.
‘
There she is.
’
It took some
moments for Samantha to realize she was looking at a ship.

‘
My God,
’
she breathed.
‘
It's so big.
’

‘
They don't come bigger
,
’
he agreed.

The structure of steel was almost a mile and a half long, three city
blocks, and the hull was as tall as a five-storey building, while the
navigation tower was another hundred feet higher than that.

Samantha shook her head.
‘
It's beyond belief. It looks like - like a
city! It's terrifying to think of that thing afloat.
’

‘
That is only the
main hull, the tank pods have been constructed in Japan. The last I
heard is that they are under tow direct to the Persian Gulf.
’

Nick stared
solemnly across the ship, blinking his eyes against the stinging wind.

‘
I must have been out of my mind
,’
he whispered,
‘
to dream up a monster
like that.
’
But there was a touch of defiant pride in his tone.

‘
It's so big - beyond imagination
,’
she encouraged him to talk about it.
‘
How big is it?
’

‘
It's not a single vessel
,’
he explained. 'No harbour in
the world could take a ship that size, it could not even approach the
continental United States, for that matter, there just is not enough
water to float it.
’

‘
Yes?
’
She loved to listen to him expound his vision,
she loved to hear the force and power of his convictions.

‘
What you're seeing is the carrying platform, the accommodation and the
main power source.
’
He held her closer.
‘
On to that, we attach the four tank pods, each one of them capable of
carrying a quarter of a million tons of crude oil, each tank almost as
large as the biggest ship afloat.
’

He was still explaining the concept
while they sat at lunch, and Charles Gras and Jules Levoisin listened as
avidly as she did.

‘
A single rigid hull of those dimensions would crack and break up in
heavy seas,
’
he took the cruet set and used it to demonstrate,
‘
but the
four individual pods have been designed so that they can move
independently of each other. This gives them the ability to ride and
absorb the movement of heavy seas. It is the most important principle
of ship construction, a hull must ride the water - not try to oppose it.
’

Across the table, Charles Gras nodded lugubrious agreement.

‘
The tank pods hive on to t
he main hull, and are carried
upon it like
remora on the body of a shark, not using their own propulsion systems,
but relying on the multiple boilers and quadruple screws of the main
hull to carry them across the oceans.
’
He pushed the cruet set around
the table and they all watched it with fascination.
‘
Then, when it
reaches the continental shelf opposite the shore discharge site, the
main hull anchors, forty or fifty, even a hundred miles offshore,
detaches one or two or all of its pod tanks, and they make those last
few miles under their own propulsion. In protected water and in chosen
weather conditions, their propulsion systems will handle them safely.
Then the empty pod ballasts itself and returns to hook on to the main
hull.
’

As he spoke, Nicholas detached the salt cellar from the cruet and
docked it against Samantha's plate. The two Frenchmen were silent,
staring at the silver salt cellar, but Samantha watched Nick's face. It
was burned dark by the sun now, lean and handsome, and he seemed charged
and vital, like a thoroughbred horse in peak of training, and she was
proud of him, proud of the force of his personality that made other men
listen when he spoke, proud of the imagination and the courage it took
to conceive and then put into operation a project of this magnitude.
Even though it were no longer his - yet his had been the vision.

Now Nicholas was talking again.
‘
Civilization is addicted to liquid
fossil fuels. Without them, it would be forced into withdrawal trauma
too horrible to contemplate. If then we have to use crude, let's pipe
it out of the earth, transport and ship it with all possible precautions
to protect ourselves from its side effects
-‘

‘
Nicholas
,’
Charles Gras
interrupted him abruptly.
‘
When last did you inspect the drawings of Golden Dawn
?’

Nick paused,
taken in full stride and a little off balance.
He frowned as he cast back
.
‘
I walked out of Christy Marine just over a
year ago.
’
And the darkness of those days settled upon him, making his
eyes bleak.

‘
A year ago we had not even been awarded the contract for the
construction of Golden Dawn.
’
Charles Gras twisted the stem of his wine
glass between his fingers, and thrust out his bottom lip.
‘
The ship you
have just described to us is very different from the ship we are
building out there.
’

‘
In what way, Charles?
’
Nick's concern was
immediate, a father hearing of radical surgery upon his first-born.

‘
The concept is the same. The mother vessel and the four tank pods, but
–‘
Charles shrugged, that eloquent Gallic gesture,
‘
it would be easier to
show it to you.
Immediately after lunch.
’

‘
D'accord
,’
Jules Levoisin nodded.
‘
But on the
condition that it does not interfere with the further enjoyment of this
fine meal.
’
He nudged Nicholas
. ‘If
you eat with a scowl on your face, mon
vieux, you will grow yourself ulcers like a bunch of Loire grapes.
’

Standing beneath the bulk of Golden Dawn, she seemed to reach up into
that low grey snow-sky, like a mighty alp of steel. The men working on
the giddy heights of her scaffolding were small as insects, and quite
unbelievably, as Samantha stared up at them, a little torn streamer of
wet grey cloud, coming up the Loire basin from the sea, blew over the
ship, obscuring the top of her navigation bridge for a few moments.

‘
She reaches up to the clouds
,’
said Nick beside her, and the pride was in
his voice as he turned back to Charles Gras.
‘
She looks good?
’
It was a
question, not a statement.
‘
She looks like the ship I planned
.’

‘
Come, Nicholas.
’

The little party
picked its way through the chaos of the yard. The squeal of power
cranes and the rumble of heavy steel transporters, the electric hissing
crackle of the huge automatic running welders combined with the roaring
gunfire barrage of the rive
ters into a cacophony that numbed the
senses. The scaffolding and hoist systems formed an almost impenetrable
forest about the mountainous hull, and steel and concrete were
glistening wet and rimmed with thin clear ice.