Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (67 page)

EL BARRAS CRUDE

BUNKERS
‘C’

HIGH CADMIUM

Peter liked to take one of the bottles and hold it to the
light. Somehow he had always expected the crude oil to be treacly and
tarlike, but it was thin as human blood and when he shook the bottle, it
coated the glass and the light through it was dark red, again like
congealing blood.

‘
Some of the crudes are black, some yellow and the Nigerians are green,
’
the pump foreman told him. This is the first red that I've seen.
’

‘
I
suppose it's the cadmium in it, Peter told him.
’

‘
Guess it is
,’
the foreman agreed seriously; all on board had very soon
learned not to talk down to Peter Berg, he expected to be treated on
equal terms.

By this time it was mid-morning and Peter had worked up enough appetite
to visit the
galle
y, where he was greeted like visiting royalty. Within
days, Peter knew his way unerringly through the labyrinthine and usually
deserted passageways. It was characteristic of these great
crude-carriers that you might wander through them for hours without
meeting another human being. With their huge bulk and their tiny crews,
the only place where there was always human presence was the navigation
bridge on the top floor of the stern quarters.

The bridge was always one of Peter's obligatory stops.

‘
Good-morning, Tug
,’
the officer of the watch would greet him.

Peter had been christened with his nickname when he had announced at the
breakfast table on his first morning:

‘
Tankers are great, but I'm going
to be a tug captain, like my dad.
’

On the bridge the ship might be taken
out of automatic to allow Peter to spell the helmsman for a while, or he
would assist the junior deck officers while they made a sun shot as an
exercise to check against the satellite navigational Decca; then, after
socializing with Captain Randle for a while, it was time to report to
his true station in the engine

‘
We were waiting on you, Tug
,’
growled the
Chief.
‘
Get your overalls on, man, we're going down the propeller shaft
tunnel.
’

The only unpleasant period of the day was when Peter's mother
insisted that he scrub off the top layers of grease and fuel oil, dress
in his number ones, and act as an unpaid steward during the cocktail
hour in the elaborate lounge of the owner's suite.

I
t was the only time that Chantelle Alexander frate
rn
ized with the ship's
officers and it was a painfully stilted hour, with Peter one of the
major sufferers - but the rest of the time he was successful in avoiding
the clinging restrictive rulings of his mother and the hated fiercely
but silently resented presence of Duncan Alexander, his stepfather.

Still, he was instinctively aware of the new and disturbing tensions
between his mother and Duncan Alexander.
In the night he heard the raised voices from the master cabin, and he
strained to catch the words. Once, when he had heard the cries of his
mother's distress, he had left his bunk and gone barefooted to knock on
the cabin door.
Duncan Alexander had opened it to him. He was in a silk dressing-gown
and his handsome features were swollen and flushed with anger.

‘
Go back to bed.
’

‘
I want to see my mother,
’
Peter had told him quietly.

‘
You need a damned good hiding
,’
Duncan had flared.
Now do as you are told.
’

‘
I want to see my mother.
’
Peter had stood his
ground, standing very straight in his pyjamas with both his tone and
expression neutral, and Chantelle had come to him in her nightdress and
knelt to embrace him.

‘
It's all right, darling. It's perfectly all right.
’
But she had been
weeping. After that there had been no more loud voices in the night.

However, except for an hour in the afternoon, when the swimming-pool was
placed out of bounds to officers and crew, while Chantelle swam and
sunbathed, she spent the rest of the time in the owner's suite, eating
all her meals there, withdrawn and silent, sitting at the panoramic
windows of her cabin, coming to life only for an hour, the evenings
while she played the owner's wife to the ship's officers.

Duncan Alexander, on the other hand, was like a caged animal. He paced
the open decks, composing long messages which were sent off regularly
over the telex in company code to Christy Marine in Leadenhall Street.

Then he would stand out on the open wing of Golden Dawn's bridge,
staring fixedly ahead at the northern horizon, awaiting the reply to his
last telex, chafing openly at having to conduct the company's business
at such long remove, and goaded by the devils of doubt and impatience
and fear.

O
ften
it
seemed as though he were trying to forge the mighty hull
onwards, faster and faster
into
the north, by the sheer power of his will.

In the north-western corner of the Caribbean basin, there is an area of
shallow warm water, hemmed in on one side by the island chain of the
great Antilles, the bulwark of Cuba and Hispaniola, while in the west
the sweep of the Yucatan peninsula runs south through Panama into the
great land-mass of South America - shallow warm trapped water and
saturated tropical air, enclosed by land-masses which can heat very
rapidly in the high hot sun of the tropics. However, all of it is
gently cooled and moderated by the benign influence of the
north-easterly trade winds so unvarying in strength and direction that
over the
centuries, sea
faring men have placed their lives and their
fortunes at risk upon their balmy wings, gambling on the constancy of
that vast moving body of mild air.

But the wind does fail
;
for no apparent reason and without previous
warning, it dies away, often merely for an hour or two, but occasionally
- very occasionally - for days or weeks at a time.

Far to the south and east of this devil's spawning ground, the Golden
Dawn ploughed massively on through the sweltering air and silken calm of
the doldrums, northwards across the equator, changing course every few
hours to maintain the great circle track that would carry her well clear
of that glittering shield of islands that the Caribbean carries, like an
armoured knight, on its shoulder.

The treacherous channels and passages through the islands were not for a
vessel of Golden Dawn's immense bulk, deep draught and limited
manoeuvrability. She was to go high above the Tropic of Cancer, and
just south of the island of Bermuda she would make her westings and
enter the wider and safer waters of the Florida Straits above Grand
Bahamas. On this course, she would be constricted by narrow and shallow
seaways for only a few hundred miles before she was out into the open
waters of the Gulf of Mexico again.

But while she ran on northwards, out of the area of equatorial calm, she
should have come out at last into the
swe
et cool airs of the trades, but
she did not. Day after day, the calm persisted, and stifling still air
pressed down on the ship. It did not in any way slow or affect her
passage, but her Master remarked to Duncan Alexander:

‘
Another corker
today, by the looks of it.
’

When he received no reply from his brooding,
silent Chairman, he retired discreetly, leaving Duncan alone on the open
wing of the bridge, with only the breeze of the ship's passage ruffling
his thick coppery hair.

However, the calm was not merely local. It extended westwards in a
wide, hot belt across the thousand islands and the basin of shallow sea
they enclosed.

The calm lay heavily on the oily waters, and the sun beat down on the
enclosing land-masses, Every hour the air heated and sucked up the
evaporating waters; a fat bubble like a swelling blister began to rise,
the first movement of air in many days. It was not a big bubble, only a
hundred miles across, but as it rose, the rotation of the earth's
surface began to twist the rising air, spinning it like a top, so that
the satellite cameras, hundreds of miles above, recorded a creamy little
spiral wisp like the decorative icing flower on a wedding cake.

The cameras relayed the picture through many channels, until at last it
reached the desk of the senior forecaster of the hurricane watch at the
meteorological headquarters at Miami in southern Florida.

‘
Looks like a ripe one
,’
he grunted to his assistant, recognizing that all
the favourable conditions for the formation of a revolving tropical
storm were present.
‘
We'll ask Airforce for a fly-through.
’

At forty-five thousand feet
the pilot of the US Airforce B52
saw the
rising dome of the storm from two hundred miles away. It had grown
enormously in only six hours.

As the warm saturated air was forced upwards, so the icy cold of the
upper troposphere condensed the water vapour into thick puffed-up silver
clouds. They boiled upwards, roiling and swirling upon themselves.
Already the dome of cloud and ferociously turbulent air was higher than
the aircraft.

Under it, a partial vacuum was formed, and the surrounding surface air
tried to move in to fill it. But it was compelled into an
anti-clockwise track around the centre by the mysterious forces of the
earth's rotation. Compelled to travel the long route, the velocity of
the air mass accelerated ferociously, and the entire system became more
unstable, more dangerous by the hour, turning
f
aster, perpetuating itself
by creating greater wind velocities and steeper pressure gradients.

The cloud at the top of the enormous rising dome reached an altitude
where the temperature was thirty degrees below freezing and the droplets
of rain turned to crystals of ice and were smeared away by upper-level
jet-streams. Long beautiful patterns of cirrus against the high blue
sky were blown hundreds of miles ahead of the storm to serve as its
heralds.

The US Airforce B52 hit the first clear-air turbulence one hundred and
fifty miles from the storm's centre. It was as though an invisible
predator had seized the fuselage and shaken it until the wings were
almost torn from their roots, and in one surge, the aircraft was flung
five thousand feet straight upwards.

‘
Very severe turbulence
,’
the pilot reported,
‘
We have vertical wind speeds
of three hundred miles an hour plus.
’
The senior forecaster in Miami
picked up the telephone and called the computer programmer on the floor
above him.
‘
Ask Charlie for a hurricane code-name.
’

And a minute later
the programmer called him back.
‘
Charlie says to call the bitch
“
Lorna
”
.
’
Six hundred miles south-west of
Miami the storm began to move forward, slowly at first but every hour
gathering power, spiralling upon itself at unbelievable velocities, its
high dome swelling upwards now through fifty thousand feet and still
climbing. The centre of the storm opened like a flower, the calm eye
extended upwards in a vertical tunnel with smooth walls of solid cloud
rising to the very summit of the dome, now sixty thousand feet above the
surface of the wind-tortured sea.