Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (49 page)

She was tied up at the end of the University jetty, and as they walked
out to her, so they could hear the voices and the laughter coming up
from below decks.

‘
Tricky Dicky
,’
Nicholas read her name on the high ugly rounded stern.

‘
But we love her
,’
Samantha said, and led him across the narrow, rickety
gangplank.
‘
She belongs to the University.
She's only one of our four research vessels. The others are all fancy
modern ships, two-hundred-footers, but the Dicky is our boat for short
field trips to the gulf or down the Keys, and she's also the faculty
clubhouse.
’

The main cabin was monastically furnished, bare planking and
hard benches, a single long table, but it was as crowded as a
fashionable discotheque, packed solid with sunburned young people, girls
and boys all in faded jeans and tee-shirts, impossible to judge sexes by
clothing or by the length of their sun-tortured and wind-tangled hair.

The air was thick with the rich smell of broiling gulf shrimps and
molten butter, and there were gallon jugs of California wine on the
table.

‘
Hey!
’
Samantha shouted above the uproar of voices raised in heated
dispute and jovial repartee.
‘
This is Nicholas.
’

A comparative silence
descended on the gathering, and they looked him over with the curious
veiled group hostility of any tribe for an interloper, an intruder in a
closed and carefully guarded group. Nick returned the scrutiny calmly,
met each pair of eyes, while realizing that despite the affected
informality of their dress and some of the wildly unkempt hairstyles and
the impressive profusion of beards, they were an elite group. There was
not a face that was not intelligent, not a pair of eyes that was not
alert and quick, and there was that special feeling of pride and self
-
confidence in all of them.

At the head of the table sat a big impressive figure, the oldest man in
the cabin, perhaps Nick's age or a little older, for there were silver
strands in his beard and his face was lined and beaten by sun and wind
and time.

‘
Hi, Nick,
’
he boomed.
‘
I won't pretend we've never heard of you.
Sam has given us all cauliflower ears
-‘

‘
You cut that out, Tom Parker
,’
Samantha stopped him sharply, and there was a ripple of laughter, a
relaxation of tension and a casual round of greetings.

‘
Hi, Nick, I'm Sally-Anne.
’
A pretty girl with china-blue eyes behind
wire-framed spectacles put a heavy tumbler of wine into his hand.

‘
We are short of glasses, guess you and Sam will have to share
.’

She slid
up along the bench and gave them a few inches of space and Samantha
perched in Nicholas
’
lap. The wine was a rough fighting red, and it
galloped, booted and spurred across his palate but Samantha sipped her
share with the same relish as if it had been a
‘5
3 Ch
a
teau Lafitte, and
she nuzzled Nicholas
’
ear and whispered:

‘
Tom is prof of the Biology
Department, he's a honey.
After you - he's my most favourite man in the world.
’

A woman came
through from the galley, carrying a huge platter piled high with bright
pink shrimps and a bowl of molten butter. There was a roar of applause
for her as she placed the dishes in the centre of the table, and they
fell upon the food with unashamed gusto
.

The woman was tall with dark
hair in braids and a strong capable face, lean and supple in tight
breeches, but she was older than the other women and she paused beside
Tom Parker and draped one arm across his shoulders in a comfortable
gesture of long-established affection.

‘
That's Antoinette, his wife.
’
The woman heard her name and smiled across
at them, and with dark gentle eyes she studied Nicholas and then nodded
and made the continental O of thumb and forefinger at Samantha, before
slipping back into the galley.

The food did not inhibit the talk, the lively contentious flow of
discussion that swung swiftly from banter to deadly
seriousness and
back again, bright
trained informed minds clicking and cannoning off each
other with the crispness of ivory billiard balls, while at the same time
buttery fingers ripped the whiskered heads off the shrimps, delving for
the crescent of sweet white flesh, then leaving greasy fingerprints on
the wine tumblers.

As each of them spoke, Samantha whispered their names and credentials.
‘
Hank Petersen, he's doing a PhD on the blue-fill tuna - spawning and a
trace of its migratory routes.
He's the one running the tagging tomorrow.
’

‘
That's Michelle Rand, she's on loan from UCLA, and she's porpoises and
whales.’

Then suddenly they were all discussing indignantly a rogue
tanker captain who the week before had scrubbed his tanks
i
n the middle
of the Florida straits and left a thirty-mile slick down the Gulf
Stream, He had done it under cover of night, and changed course as soon
as he was into the Atlantic proper.

‘
We finger-printed him,
’
Tom Parker like an angry bear,
‘
we had him made,
dead in the cross hairs.
’
Nick knew he was talking of the
finger-printing of oil residues, the breakdown of samples of the slick
under gas spectroscopy which could match them exactly to the samples
taken by the Coast Guard from the offender's tanks. The identification
was good enough to bear up in an international court of law.
‘
But the
trick is getting the son-of-a-bitch into court.
’
Tom Parker went on. 'He
was fifty miles outside our territorial waters by the time the Coast
Guard got to him, and he's registered in Liberia.
’

‘
We tried to cover
cases like that in the set of proposals I put up to the last maritime
conference.
’
Nick joined the conversation for the first time. He told
them of the difficulties of legislating on an international scale, of
policing and bringing to justice the blatant transgressors; then he
listed for them what had been done so far, what was in process and
finally what he believed still should be done to protect the seas.

He spoke quietly, succinctly, and Samantha noticed again, with a swell
of pride, how all men listened when Nicholas Berg talked. The moment he
paused, they came at him from every direction, using their bright young
minds like scalpels, tearing into him with sharp lancing questions. He
answered them in the same fashion, sharp and hard, armed with total
knowledge of his subject, and he saw the shift in the group attitude,
the blooming of respect, the subtle opening of ranks to admit him, for
he had spoken the correct passwords and they recognized him as one of
their own number, as one of the elite.

At the head of the table, Tom Parker sat and listened, nodding and
frowning, sitting in judgement with his arm around Antoinette's slim
waist and she stood beside him and played idly with a curl of thick wiry
hair on the top of his head.

Tom Parker found fish forty miles offshore where the Gulf Stream was
setting blue and warm and fast into the north.
The birds were working, falling on folded wings down the backdrop of
cumulonimbus storm clouds that bruised the horizon. The birds were
bright, white pinpoints of light as they fell, and they struck the dark
blue water with tiny explosions of white spray, and went deep. Seconds
later they popped to the surface, stretching their necks to force down
another morsel into their distended crops, before launching into flight
again, climbing in steep circles against the sky to join the hunt again.
There were hundreds of them and they swirled and fell like snowflakes.

‘
Anchovy
,’
grunted Tom Parker, and they could see the agitated surface of
the water under the bird flock where the frenzied bait-fish churned.
‘
Could be bonito working under them.
’

‘
No" said Nick.
‘
They are blues.
’

‘
You
sure?
’
Tom grinned a challenge.

‘
The way they are bunching and holding the bait-fish, it's tuna,
’
Nick
repeated.

‘
Five bucks?
’
Tom asked, as he swung the wheel over, and Tricky Dicky's
big diesel engine boomed as she went on to the top of her speed.

‘
You're on
,’
Nick grinned back at him, and at that moment, they both saw a
fish jump clear. It was a brilliant shimmering torpedo, as long as a
man's arm. It went six feet into the air, turned in flight and hit the
water again with a smack they heard clearly above the diesel.

‘
Blues
,’
said Nick flatly.
‘
Shoal blues - they'll go twenty pounds each.
’

‘
Five bucks
,’
Tom grunted with disgust.
’
Son of a gun, I don't think I can
afford you, man
,’
and he delivered a playful punch to the shoulder which
rattled Nick's teeth, then he turned to the open window of the
wheelhouse and bellowed out on to the deck,
‘
Okay, kids, they are blues.
’
There was a scramble and chatter of excitement as they rushed for lines
and tagging poles. It was Hank's show, he was the blue
fin
tunny
expert, he knew as much about their sex habits, their migratory routes
and food chains as any man living but when it came to catching them,
Nick observed drily, he could probably do a better job as a blacksmith.

Tom Parker was no fisherman either. He ran down the shoal, charging
Tricky Dicky through the centre of it, scattering birds and fish in
panic - but by sheer chance one of the gang in the stern hooked in, and
after a great deal of heaving and huffing and shouted encouragement from
his peers, dragged a single luckless baby blue-
fin
tuna over the rail.
It skittered and jumped around the deck, its tail hammering against the
planking, pursued by a shrieking band of scientists who slid and slipped
in the fish slime, knocked each other down and finally cornered the fish
against the rail. The first three attempts to affix the plastic tag
were unsuccessful, Hank's lunges with the dart pole becoming wilder as
his frustration mounted. He almost succeeded in tagging Samantha's
raised backside as she knelt on the deck trying to cradle the fish in
both arms.

‘
You do this often?
’
Nicholas asked mildly.

‘
First time with this gang
,’
Tom Parker admitted sheepishly. 'Thought
you'd never guess.
’

By now the triumphant band was solicitously
returning the fish to the sea, the barbed dart of the plastic tag
embedded dangerously near its vitals; and if that didn't eventually kill
it, the rough handling probably would. It had pounded its head on the
deck so heavily that blood oozed from the gill covers, It floated away,
belly up on the stream oblivious of Samantha's anguished cries of: