Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (75 page)

It made him nervous and edgy to think about it. He searched in his back
pocket, found a sticky mint humbug, carefully picked off the little
pieces of lint and fluff before tucking it into his cheek like a
squirrel with a nut, sucking noisily upon it as he resumed his restless
prowling up and down the control console.

His on-duty stokers and the oilers watched him surreptitiously. When the
old man was in a mood, it was best not to attract attention.

‘
Dickson!
’
the Chief said suddenly.
‘
Get your lid on. We are going down
the shaft tunnel again.
’

The oiler sighed, exchanged a resigned glance
with one of his mates and clapped his hard-hat on his head. He and the
Chief had been down the tunnel an hour previously. It was an
uncomfortable, noisy and dirty journey.

The oiler closed the watertight doors into the shaft tunnel behind them,
screwing down the clamps firmly under the Chief's frosty scrutiny, and
then both men stooped in the confined headroom and started off along the
brightly lit pale grey painted tunnel.

The spinning shaft in its deep bed generated a high
-
pitched whine that
seemed to resonate in the steel box of the tunnel, as though it was the
body of a violin. Surprisingly, the noise was more pronounced at this
low speed setting, it seemed to bore into the teeth at the back of the
oiler's jaw like a dentist's drill.

The Chief did not seem to be affected. He paused beside the main
bearing for almost ten minutes, testing it with the palm of his hand,
feeling for heat or vibration. His expression was morose, and he
worried the mint humbug in his cheek and shook his head with foreboding
We are going on up the tunnel.

When he reached the main gland, he squatted down suddenly and peered at
it closely. With a deliberate fle
xing
of his jaw he crushed the remains of
the humbug between his teeth, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

There was a thin trickle of seawater oozing through the gland and
running down into the bilges. The Chief touched it with his finger.
Something had shifted, some balance was disturbed, the seal of the gland
was no longer watertight - such a small sign, a few gallons of seawater,
could be the first warning of major structural damage.

The Chief shuffled around, still hunched down beside the shaft bed, and
he lowered his face until it was only inches from the spinning steel
main shaft. He closed one eye, and cocked his head, trying once again
to decide if the faint blurring of the shaft's outline was real or
merely his over-active imagination, whether what he was seeing was
distortion or his own fears.

Suddenly, startlingly, the shaft slammed into stillness.
The deceleration was so abrupt that the Chief could actually see the
torque transferred into the shaft bed, and the metal walls creaked and
popped with the strain.

He rocked back on to his heels, and almost instantly the shaft began to
spin again, but this time in reverse thrust.
The whine built up swiftly into a rising shriek. They were Pulling
emergency power from the bridge, and it was madness, suicidal madness.

The Chief seized the oiler by the shoulder and shouted into his ear,
‘
Get
back to control - find out what the hell they are doing on the bridge.
’

The oiler scrambled away down the tunnel; it would take him ten minutes
to negotiate the long narrow passage, open the watertight doors and
reach the control room and as long again to return.

The Chief considered going after him, but somehow he could not leave the
shaft now. He lowered his head again, and now he could clearly see the
flickering outline of the shaft. It wasn't imagination at all, there
was a little ghost of movement. He clamped his hands over his ears to
cut out the painful shriek of the spinning metal, but there was a new
note to it, the squeal of bare metal on metal and before his eyes he saw
the ghost outline along the edge of the shaft growing, the flutter of
machinery out of balance, and the metal deck under his feet began to
quiver.

‘
God! They are going to blow the whole thing!
’
he shouted, and jumped up
from his crouch. Now the deck was juddering and shaking under his feet.
He started back along the shaft, but the entire tunnel was agitating so
violently that he had to grab the metal bulkhead to steady himself, and
he reeled drunkenly, thrown about like a captive insect in a cruel
child's box.

Ahead of him, he saw the huge metal casting of the main bearing twisting
and shaking, and the vibration chattered his teeth in his clenched jaw
and drove up his spine like a jack hammer.

Disbelievingly he saw the huge silver shaft beginning to rise and buckle
in its bed, the bearing tearing loose from its mountings.

‘
Shut down!
’
he screamed.
‘
For God's sake, shut down!
’
but his voice was
lost in the shriek and scream of tortured metal and machinery that was
tearing itself to pieces in a suicidal frenzy.

The main bearing exploded, and the shaft slammed it into the bulkhead,
tearing steel plate like paper.

The shaft itself began to snake and whip. The Chief cowered back,
pressing his back to the bulkhead and covering his ears to protect them
from the unbearable volume of noise.

A sliver of heated steel flew from the bearing and struck him in the
face, laying open his upper lip to the bone, crushing his nose and
snapping off his front teeth at the level of his gums.

He toppled forward, and the whipping, kicking shaft seized him like a
mindless predator and tore his body to pieces, pounding him and crushing
him in the shaft bed and splattering him against the pale metal walls.

The main shaft snapped like a rotten twig at the point where it had been
heated and weakened. The unbalanced weight of the revolving propeller
ripped the stump out
through the after seal, as though it were a tooth plucked from a
rotting jaw.

The sea rushed in through the opening, flooding the tunnel instantly
until it slammed into the watertight doors - and the huge glistening
bronze propeller, with the stump of the main shaft still attached, the
whole unit weighing one hundred and fifty tons, plummeted downwards
through four hundred fathoms to embed itself deeply in the soft mud of
the sea bottom.

Freed of the intolerable goad of her damaged shaft, Golden Dawn was
suddenly silent and her decks still and steady as she trundled on,
slowly losing way as the water dragged at her hull.

Samantha had one awful moment of sickening guilt. She saw clearly that
she was responsible for the deadly danger into which she had led these
people, and she stared out over the boat's side at the Golden Dawn.

The tanker was coming on without any check in her speed; perhaps she had
turned a few degrees, for her bows were no longer pointed directly at
them, but her speed was constant.

She was achingly aware of her inexperience, of her helplessness in this
alien situation. She tried to think, to force herself out of this
frozen despondency.

‘
Life-jackets!
’
she thought, and yelled to Sally-Anne out on the deck,
‘
The life-jackets are in the lockers behind the wheelhouse.
’
Their faces
turned to her, suddenly stricken. Up to this moment it had all been a
glorious romp, the old fun-game of challenging the money-grabbers,
prodding the establishment, but now suddenly it was mortal danger.

‘
Move!
’
Samantha shrieked at them, and there was a rush back along the
deck.

‘
Think!
’
Samantha shook her head, as though to clear it.
‘
Think!
’
she urged herself fiercely. She could hear the tanker now, the
silken rustling sound of the water under its hull, the sough of the bow
wave curling upon itself.

The Dicky's throttle linkage had broken before, when they had been off
Key West a year ago. It had broken between the bridge and the engine,
and Samantha had watched Tom Parker fiddling with the engine, holding
the lantern for him to see in the gloomy confines of the smelly little
engine room. She had not been certain how he did it, but she remembered
that he had controlled the revolutions of the engine by hand - something
on the side of the engine block, below the big bowl of the air filter.

Samantha turned and dived down the vertical ladder into the engine room.
The diesel was running, burbling away quietly at idling speed, not
generating sufficient power to move the little vessel through the water.

She tripped and sprawled on the greasy deck, and pulled herself up,
crying out with pain as her hand touched the red-hot manifold of the
engine exhaust.

On the far side of the engine block, she groped desperately under the
air filter, pushing and tugging at anything her fingers touched. She
found a coil spring, and dropped to her knees to examine it.

She tried not to think of the huge steel hull bearing down on them, of
being down in this tiny box that stank of diesel and exhaust fumes and
old bilges. She tried not to think of not having a life-jacket, or that
the tanker could tramp the little vessel deep down under the surface and
crush her like a matchbox.

Instead, she traced the little coil spring to where it was pinned into a
flat upright lever. Desperately she pushed the lever against the
tension of the spring - and instantly the diesel engine bellowed
deafeningly in her ears, startling her so that she flinched and lost the
lever. The diesel's beat died away into the bumbling idle and she
wasted seconds while she found the lever again and pushed it hard
against its stops once more. The engine roared, and she felt the ship
picking up speed under her. She began to pray incoherently.

She could not hear the words in the engine noise, and she was not sure
she was making sense, but she held the throttle open, and kept on
praying.

She did not hear the screams from the deck above her.
She did not know how close the Golden Dawn was, she did not know if Hank
Petersen was still in the wheelhouse conning the little vessel out of
the path of the onrushing tanker - but she held the throttle open and
prayed.

The impact when it came was shattering, the crash and crackle of timbers
breaking, the rending lurch and the roll of the deck giving to the
tearing force of it.

Samantha was hurled against the hot steel of the engine, her forehead
striking with such a force that her vision starred into blinding white
light; she dropped backwards, her body loose and relaxed, darkness
ringing in her ears, and lay huddled on the deck.

She did not know how long she was unconscious, but it could not have
been for more than a few seconds; the spray of icy cold water on her
face roused her and she pulled herself up on to her knees.

In the glare of the single bare electric globe in the deck above her,
Samantha saw the spurts of water jets through the starting planking of
the bulkhead beside her.

Her shirt and denim pants were soaked, salt water half blinded her, and
her head felt as though the skull were cracked and someone was forcing
the sharp end of a bradawl between her
.
Dimly she was aware that the
diesel engine was idling noisily, and that the deck was sloshing with
water as the boat rolled wildly in some powerful turbulence. She
wondered if the whole vessel had been trodden under the tanker.