Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (35 page)

It was a long walk through the crowded yard, almost twenty minutes
merely to round the tanker
’
s stern - and suddenly Nicholas stopped so
abruptly that Samantha collided with him and might have fallen on the
icy concrete, but he caught her arm and held her as he stared up at the
bulbous stern.

It formed a great overhanging roof like that of a medieval cathedral, so
that Nick's head was flung back, and the grip on her arm tightened so
fiercely that she protested. He seemed not to hear, but went on staring
upwards.

‘
Yes,
’
Charles Gras nodded, and the lank black hair flopped like against
his forehead.
‘
That is one difference from the ship you designed.
’

The
propeller was in lustrous ferro-bronze, six-bladed, each shaped with the
beauty and symmetry of a butterfly's wing, but so enormous as to make
the comparison laughable. It was so big that not even the bulk of
Golden Dawn's own hull could dwarf it, each separate blade was longer
and broader than the full wingspan of a jumbo
j
et airliner, a gargantuan
sculpture in gleaming metal.

‘
One!
’
whispered Nick.
‘
One only.
’

‘
Yes,
’
Charles Gras agreed, 'Not four -
but one propeller only. Also, Nicholas, it is fixed pitch.
’

They were
all silent as they rode up in the cage of the hoist. The hoist ran up
the outside of the hull to the level of the main deck, and though the
wind searched for them remorselessly through the open mesh of the cage,
it was not the cold that kept them silent.

The engine compartment was an echoing cavern, harshly lit by the
overhead floodlights, and they stood high on one of the overhead steel
catwalks looking down fifty feet on to the boiler and condensers of the
main engine.

Nick stared down for almost five minutes. He asked no questions, made
no but at last he turned to Charles Gras and nodded once curtly.

‘
All right. I've seen enough,
’
he said, and the engineer led them to the
elevator station. Again they rode upwards.
I
t was like being in a modern office block - the polished chrome and
wood panelling of the elevator, the carpeted passageways high in the
navigation tower along which Charles Gras led them to the Master's suite
and unlocked the carved mahogany doorway with a key from his watch
chain.

Jules Levoisin looked slowly about the suite and shook his head
wonderingly.
‘
Ah, this is the way to live
,’
he breathed. 'Nicholas, I
absolutely insist that the Master's quarters of Sea Witch be decorated
like this.
’

Nick did not smile, but crossed to the view windows that
looked for
ward along the tanker's main deck to her round blunt unlovely
prow a mile and a quarter away. He stood with his hands clasped behind
his back, legs apart, chin thrust out angrily and nobody else spoke
while Charles Gras opened the elaborate bar and poured cognac into the
crystal brandy balloons. He carried a glass to Nick who turned away
from the window.

‘
Thank you, Charles, I need something to warm the chill in my guts.
’
Nick
sipped the cognac and rolled it on his tongue as he looked slowly around
the opulent cabin.

It occupied almost half the width of the navigation bridge, and was
large enough to house a diplomatic reception. Duncan Alexander had
picked a good decorator to do the job, and without the view from the
window it might have been an elegant Fifth Avenue New York apartment, or
one of those penthouses high on the cliffs above Monte Carlo,
overlooking the harbour.

Slowly Nick crossed the thick green carpet, woven with the house device,
the entwined letters C and M for Christy Marine, and he stopped before
the Degas in its place of honour above the marble fireplace.

He remembered Chantelle's bubbling joy at the purchase of that painting.
It was one of Degas ballet pieces, soft, almost luminous light on the
limbs of the dancers, and, remembering the unfailing delight that
Chantelle had taken in it during the years, he was amazed that she had
allowed it to be used on board one of the company ships, and that it was
left here virtually unguarded and vulnerable. That painting was worth a
quarter of a million pounds.

He leaned closer to it, and only then did he realize how clever a copy
of the original it was.
He shook his head in dismissal.

‘
The owners were
advised that the sea air may damage the original
,’
Charles Gras shrugged,
and spread his hands deprecatingly, 'and not many people would know the
difference.
’

That was typical of Duncan Alexander,
’
Nicholas thought
savagely.
‘
It could only be his idea, the sharp accountant's brain. The
conviction that it was possible to fool all of the people all of the
time.
’

Everybody knew that Chantelle owned that work, therefore nobody would
doubt its authenticity. That's the way Duncan Alexander would reason
it. It could not be Chantelle's idea. She had never been one to accept
anything that was sham or dross; it was a measure of the power that he
exerted over her, for her to go along with this cheap little fraud.

Nicholas indicated the forgery with his glass and spoke directly to
Charles Gras.

‘
This is a cheat
,’
he spoke quietly, his anger contained and controlled,
‘
but it is harmless.
’
Now he turned away from it and, with a wider
gesture that embraced the whole ship, went on,
‘
But this other cheat,
this enormous fraud
,’
he paused to control the metallic edge that had
entered his tone, going on quietly again,
‘
this is a vicious, murderous
gamble he is taking. He has bastardized the entire concept of the
scheme. One propeller instead of four - it cannot manoeuvre a hull of
these dimensions with safety in any hazardous situation, it cannot
deliver sufficient thrust to avoid collision, to fight her off a lee
shore, to handle heavy seas.
’
Nick stopped, and his voice dropped even
lower, yet somehow it was more compelling.
‘
This ship cannot, by all
moral and natural laws, be operated on a single boiler.
My design called for eight separate boilers and condensers, the standard
set for the old White Star and Cunard Lines.
But Duncan Alexander has installed a single boiler system.
‘
There is no back-up, no fail-safe - a few gallons of sea water in the
system could disable this monster.
’

Nicholas stopped suddenly as a new
thought struck him.
‘
Charles
,’
his voice sharper still,
‘
the pod tanks, the design of the pod
tanks. He hasn't altered that, has he? He hasn't cut the corners
there? Tell me, old friend, they are still self -propelled, are they
not?
’

Charles Gras brought the Courvoisier bottle to where Nicholas
stood, and when Nick would have refused the addition to his glass,
Charles told him sorrowfully,
‘
Come, Nicholas, you will need it for what
I have to tell you now.
’

As he poured, he said,
‘
The pod tankers, their
design has been altered also.
’
He drew a breath to tell it with a rush.
‘
They no longer have their own propulsion units. They are now only dumb
barges that must be docked and undocked from the main hull and
manoeuvred only by attendant tugs.
’

Nicholas stared at him, his lips
blanched to thin white lines.
‘
No. I do not believe it. Not even
Duncan
–‘

‘
Duncan Alexander has saved forty-two million dollars by
re-designing Golden Dawn and equipping her with only a single boiler and
propeller.
’
Charles Gras shrugged again.
‘
And forty-two million dollars is a lot of money.
’

There was a pale gleam
of wintry sunlight that flickered through the low grey cloud and lit the
fields not far from the River Thames with that incredible vivid shade of
Eng
l
is
h
green.

Samantha and Nicholas stood in a thin line of miserably cold parents and
watched the pile of struggling boys across the field in their coloured
jerseys; the light blue and black of Eton, the black and white of St
Paul's, were so muddied as to be barely distinguishable.

‘
What are they doing?
’
Samantha demanded, holding the collar of her coat
around her ears.

‘
It's called a scrum
,’
Nick told her.
‘
That's how they decide which team
gets the ball.

‘
Wow. There must be an easier way.
’

There was a flurry
of sudden movement and the slippery egg-shaped ball flew back in a lazy
curve that was snapped up by a boy in the Etonian colours. He started
to run.

‘
It's Peter, isn't it?
’
cried Samantha.

‘
Go it, Peter boy!
’
Nick -roared, and the child ran with the ball
clutched to his chest and his head thrown back.

He ran strongly with the reaching coordinated stride of an older boy,
swerving round a knot of his opponents, leaving them floundering in the
churned mud, and angling across the lush thick grass towards the
white-painted goal line, trying to reach the corner before a taller more
powerfully built lad who was pounding across the field to intercept him.

Samantha began to leap up and down on the same spot, shrieking wildly,
completely uncertain of what was happening, but wild with excitement
that infected Nicholas.

The two runners converged at an angle which would bring them to the
white line at the same moment, at a point directly in front of where
Nick and Samantha stood.

Nick saw the contortion of his son's face, and realized that this was a
total effort. He felt a physical constriction of his own chest as he
watched the boy drive himself to his utmost limits, the sinews standing
out in his throat, his lips drawn back in a frozen rictus of endeavour
that exposed the teeth clenched in his jaw.

From infancy, Peter Berg had brought to any task that faced him the same
complete focus of all his capabilities.
Like his grandfather, old Arthur Christy, and his own father, he would
be one of life's winners. Nick knew this instinctively, as he watched
him run. He had inherited the intelligence, the comeliness and the
charisma, but he bolstered all that with this unquenchable desire to
succeed in all he did. The single-minded determination to focus all his
talents on the immediate project. Nick felt the pressure in his chest
swell. The boy was all right, more than all right, and pride threatened
to choke him.

Sheer force of will had driven Peter Berg a pace ahead of his bigger,
longer-legged adversary, and now he leaned forward with the ball held in
both hands, arms fully extended, reaching for the line to make the
touch-down.