Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (52 page)

Lazar
us had finished the insurance portion of his report and he stood
up abruptly, just as Miss Lovelace was about to attempt the impossible.
With relief, Nick followed him down the aisle and into the chill of a
Parisian evening, and they breathed the fumes that the teeming city
exhaled as Lazarus led him back eastwards through the
VIII
Arrondissement
with those little dancing steps, while he recited the details of the
charters of all Christy Marine's vessels, the charterer, the rates, the
dates of expiry of contract; and Nicholas recognized most of them,
contracts that he himself had negotiated, or those that had been renewed
on expiry with minor alterations to the terms. He was relying on the
recorder in his pocket, listening only with the surface layer of his
mind, pondering all he had heard so far from this extraordinary little
man - so that when it came he almost did not realize what he was
hearing.

‘O
n 10th January Christy Marine entered a contract of carriage with Orient
Amex. The tenure is ten years. The vessel to be employed is the Golden
Dawn, The rate is 10 cents US per hundred ton miles with a minimum
annual guaranteed usage Of 75,000 nautical miles.
’

Nicholas registered
the trigger word Golden Dawn and then he assimilated it all.

The price, ten cents per hundred miles, that was wrong, high, much too
high, ridiculously high in this depressed market. Then the name, Orient
Amex - what was there about it that jarred his memory?

He stopped dead, and a following pedestrian bumped him, Nicholas
shouldered him aside thoughtlessly and stood thinking, ransacking his
mind for buried items of information. Lazarus had stopped also and was
waiting patiently, and now Nicholas laid a hand on the little man's
shoulder.

‘
I need a drink.
’

He drew him into a brasserie which was thick with steam
from the coffee machine and the smoke of Caporal and Disque Bleu, and
sat him at a tiny table by the window overlooking the sidewalk.

Primly, Lazarus asked for a Vittel water and sipped it with an air of
virtue, while Nicholas poured soda into his whisky.

‘
Orient Amex
,’
Nicholas asked, as soon as the waiter had left.
‘
Tell me
about it.
’

‘
That is outside my original terms of reference
,’
Lazarus
demurred delicately.

‘
Charge me for it
,’
Nicholas invited, and Lazarus paused as the computer
reels clicked in his mind, then he began to speak.

‘
Orient Amex is an American-registered company, with an capital of
twenty-five million shares at a par value of ten dollars
–‘
Lazarus
recited the dry statistics.
T
he company is presently undertaking substantial dry
-
land exploration in
Western Australia and Ethiopia, and offshore exploration within the
territorial waters of Norway and Chile. It has erected a refinery at
Galveston in Texas to operate under the new atomic catalyst cracking
process, first employed at its pilot plant on the same site.
The plant is projected for initial operation in June this year, and full
production in five years.

It was all vaguely familiar to Nicholas, the
names, the process of cracking the low-value high-carbon molecules,
breaking up the carbon atoms and reassembling them in volatile
low-carbon molecules of high value.

The company operates producing wells in Texas, and in the Santa Barbara
offshore field, in Southern Nigeria, and has proven crude reserves in
the El Barras field of Kuwait, which will be utilized by the new
cracking plant in Galveston.

‘Good God,’ Nicholas stared at him
‘
The El Barras field
-
but it's cadmium-contaminated
,
it's been condemned by
-‘

‘
The El
Barras field is a high cadmium field, naturally enriched with the
catalyst necessary for the new process.
’

‘
What are the cadmium elements?
’
Nicholas demanded.

‘
The western area of the El Barras field has sampled at 2,000 parts per
million, and the north and eastern anticline have sampled as high as
42,000 parts per million.
’
Lazarus recited the figures pedantically.
‘
The
American and Nigerian crudes will be blended with the El Barras crudes
during the revolutionary cracking process. It is projected that the
yield of low-carbon volatiles will be increased from 40%
to 85
% by this
process, making it
five to eight times more to
profitable, and
extending the life of the world's known rese
rv
es of crude petroleum by
between ten and fifteen years.
’

As he listened, Nicholas had a vivid
mental image of the stylus in Samantha's laboratory recording the death
th
roes of a cadmium-poisoned clam.
Lazarus was talking on
dispassionately.
‘
During the cracking process, the cadmium sulphide will
be reduced to its pure metallic, non-toxic form, and will be a valuable
by-product,
reducing the costs of refining.

Nicholas shook his head in
disbelief, and he spoke aloud.
‘
Duncan is going to do it. Across two oceans a million tons at a time,
in that vulnerable jerry-built monster of his, Duncan is going to do
what no other ship-owner has ever dared to do - he's going to carry the
cad-rich crudes of El Barras!
’

From the balcony windows of his suite in
the Ritz, Nicholas could look out across the Place Vendome at the column
in the centre of the square with its spiral
b
as-relief made from the
Russian and Austrian guns and commemorating the little Corsican
’
s feats
of arms against those two nations. While he studied the column and
waited for his connection, he did a quick calculation and realized that
it would be three o'clock in the morning on the eastern seaboard of
North America. At least he would find her at home.

Then he smiled to himself. If she wasn't at home, he'd want to know the
reason why.

The telephone rang and he picked it up without turning away from the
window.

There was a confused mumbling and Nicholas asked,
‘
Who is this?
’

'It's Sam
Silver - what's the time? Who is it? Good God
,
it's three o'clock.
What do you want?
’

‘
Tell that other guy to put his pants on and go home.
’

‘
Nicholas!
’
There was a joyous squeal, followed immediately by a crash
and clatter that made Nicholas wince and lift the receiver well away
from his ear.

‘
Oh damn it to hell, I've knocked the table over. Nicholas, are you
there? Speak to me, for God's sake!
’

‘
I love you.
’

‘
Say that again,
please. Where are you?
’

‘
Paris. I love you.
’

‘
Oh
,’
her tone drooped miserably.
‘
You sound so close.
I thought -'
Then she rallied gamely. I love you too - how's himself?

‘
On
the dole.
’

‘
Who is she?
’

‘Dole is unemployment insurance – w
elfare
.’
He sought the American equivalent.
‘
I mean he is temporarily unemployed.
’

‘
Great. Keep him that way. Did I tell you I love you, I forget?
’

‘
Wake
up. Shake yourself. I've got something to tell you.
’

‘
I'm awake - well,
almost anyway.
’

‘
Samantha, what would happen if somebody dumped a million
tons Of 40,000 parts concentration of cadmium sulphide in an emulsion of
aromatic Arabian crude into the Gulf Stream, say thirty nautical miles
off Key West?
’

‘
That's a freaky question, Nicholas. For three in the
morning, that's a bomber.
’

‘
What would happen?
’
he insisted.

‘
The crude would act as a transporting medium
,’
she was struggling to
project a scenario through her sleepiness,
‘
it would spread out on the
surface to a thickness of quarter of an inch or so, so you'd end up with
a slick of a few thousand miles long and four or five hundred wide, and
it would keep going.
’

‘
What would be the results?
’

‘
It would wipe out most
of the marine life on the Bahamas and on the eastern seaboard of the
States, no, correct that - it would wipe out all marine life, that
includes the spawning grounds of the tuna, the freshwater eels and the
sperm whale, and it would contaminate
–‘
she was coming fully awake now,
and a stirring horror altered her tone
–‘
You're macabre, Nicholas, what
a sick thing to think about, especially at three in the morning.
’

‘
Human
life?
’
the asked.

‘
Yes, there would be heavy loss,
’
she said.
‘
As sulphide, it would be
readily absorbed and in that concentration it would be poisonous on
contact, fishermen, vacationers, anybody who walked on a contaminated
beach.
’
She was truly beginning to realize the enormity of it.
‘
A large
part of the population of the cities on the east coast - Nicholas, it
could amount to hundreds of thousands of human beings, and if it was
carried beyond America on the Gulf Stream, the Newfoundland Banks,
Iceland, the North Sea, it would poison the cod fisheries, it would kill
everything, man, fish, bird and animal. Then the tail of the Gulf
Stream twists around the British Isles and the north continent of Europe
- but why are you asking me this, what kind of crazy guessing game is
this, Nicholas?
’

‘
Christy Marine has signed a ten-year contract to carry
one million ton loads of crude from the El Barras field on the South
Arabian Gulf to the Orient Amex refinery in Galveston. The El Barras
crude has a cadmium sulphide constituent of between 2,000 and 40,000
parts per million.
’

Now there was trembling outrage in her voice as she
whispered,
‘
A million tons! That's some sort of genocide, Nicholas,
there has probably never been a more deadly cargo in the history of
seafaring.
’

‘
In a few weeks time Golden Dawn will run down her ways at St Nazai
r
e
and when she does, the seeds of
catastrophe will be sewn upon
the oceans.
’

‘
Her route from the Arabian Gulf takes her around Good Hope.
’