Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (78 page)

‘
No, only the ship
,’
he
said brusquely, and he was amazed that the spell was broken. That soft
area of his soul which she had been able to touch so unerringly was now
armoured against her. With a sudden surge of relief, he realized he was
free of her, for ever. It was over; here in the storm, he was free at
last.

She sensed for the fear in her eyes changed to real terror.

‘
Nicholas, you cannot desert me now. Oh Nicholas, what will become of me
without you and Christy Marine?
’

‘
I don't know
,’
he told her quietly, and
caught the bosun's chair as it came in over Golden Dawn's rail. He
lifted her as easily as he had lifted his son and placed her in the
canvas bucket.

‘
And to tell you the truth, Chantelle, I don't really care,
’
he said, and
stepping back, he windmilled his right arm.
The chair swooped out across the narrow water, swinging like a pendulum
in the wind. Chantelle shouted something at him but Nicholas had turned
away, and was already going aft in a lurching run to where the three
volunteers were waiting.

He saw at a glance that they were big, powerful, competent-looking men.

Quickly Nicholas checked their equipment, from the thick leather
gauntlets to the bolt cutters and jemmy bars for handling heavy cable.

‘
You'll do,
’
he said.
‘
We will use the bosun's tackle to bring across a
messenger from the tug - just as soon as the last man leaves this ship.
’

Working with men to whom the task was unfamiliar, and in rapidly
deteriorating conditions of sea and weather, it took almost another hour
before they had the main cable across from Warlock secured by its thick
nylon spring to the tanker's stern bollards - yet the time had passed so
swiftly for Nicholas that when he stood back and glanced at his watch,
he was shocked. Before this wind they must have been going down very
fast on the land. He staggered into the tanker's stern quarters, and
left a trail of sea water down
the passageway to the elevators.

On the
bridge, Captain Randle was standing grim-faced at the helm, and Duncan
Alexander snapped accusingly at him.

‘
You've cut it damned fine.
’
A single glance at the digital print-out of
the depth gauge on the tanker's control console bore him out. They had
thirty-eight fathoms of water under them now, and the Golden
Dawn
’
s
swollen belly sagged down twenty fathoms below the surface. They were
going down very swiftly before the easterly gale winds. It was damned
fine, Nicholas had to agree, but he showed no alarm or agitation as he
crossed to Randle's side and unhooked the hand microphone.

‘
David
,’
he asked quietly,
‘
are you ready to haul us off?
’

‘
Ready, sir
,’
David Allen's voice came from the speaker above his head.

‘
I'm going to give you full port rudder to help your turn across the
wind
,’
said Nicholas, and then nodded to Randle.
‘
Full port rudder.
’

‘
Forty
degrees of port rudder on
,’
Randle reported.

They felt the tiny shock as the tow-cable came up taut, and carefully
Warlock began the delicate task of turning the huge ship across the
rising gusting wind and then dragging her out tail first into the deeper
water of the channel where she would have her best chance of riding out
the hurricane.

It was clear now that Golden Dawn lay directly in the track of Lorna,
and the storm unleashed its true nature upon them. Out there upon the
sane and rational world, the sun was rising, but here there was no dawn,
for there was no horizon and no sky. There was only madness and wind
and water, and all three elements were so intermingled as to form one
substance.

An hour - which seemed like a lifetime - ago, the wind had ripped away
the
anemometer
and the weather-recording equipment on top of the
navigation bridge, so Nicholas had no way of judging the wind's strength
and direction.

Out beyond the bridge windows, the wind took the top off the sea; it
took it off in thick sheets of salt water and lifted them over the
navigation bridge in a shrieking white curtain that cut off visibility
at the glass of the windows.

The tank deck had disappeared in the racing white emulsion of wind and
water, even the railing of the bridge wings six feet from the windows
was invisible.

The entire superstructure groaned and popped and whimpered under the
assault of the wind, the pressed aluminium bulkheads bulging and
distorting the very deck flexing and juddering at the solid weight of
the storm.

Through the saturated, racing, swirling air, a leaden and ominous grey
light filtered, and every few minutes the electrical impulses generated
within the sixty-thousand foot-high mountain of racing, spinning air
released themselves in shattering cannonades of thunder and sudden
brilliance of eye-searing white lightning.

There was no visual contact with Warlock. The massive electrical
disturbance of the storm and the clutter of high seas and almost solid
cloud and turbulence had reduced the radar range to a few miles, and
even then was unreliable.

Radio contact with the tug was drowned with buzzing squealing static. It
was possible to understand only odd disconnected words from David Allen.

Nicholas was powerless, caged in the groaning, vibrating box of the
navigation bridge, blinded and deafened by the unleashed powers of the
heavens. There was nothing any of them could do.

Randle had locked the ultra-tanker's helm amidships, and now he stood
with Duncan and the three seamen by the chart-table, all of them
clinging to it for support, all their faces pale and set as though
carved from chalk.

Only Nicholas moved restlessly about the bridge; from the stern windows
where he peered down vainly, trying to get a glimpse of either the
tow-cable and its spring, or of the tug's looming shape through the
racing white storm, then he came forward carefully, using the
foul-weather rail to steady himself against the huge ship's wild and
unpredictable motion, and he stood before the control console, studying
the display of lights that monitored the pod tanks and the ship's
navigational and mechanical functions.

None of the petroleum tanks had lost any crude oil and in all of them
the nature of the inert gas was constant, there had been no ingress of
air to them; they were all still intact then, One of the reasons that
Nicholas had taken the tanker in tow stern first was so that the
navigation tower might break the worst of wind and sea, and the fragile
bloated tanks would receive some protection from
it.

Yet desperately he
wished for a momentary sight of the tank deck, merely to reassure
himself. There could be malfunction in the pump control instruments,
the storm could have clawed one of the pod tanks open, and even now
Golden
Dawn could
be bleeding her
p
oison into the sea. But there was no
view of the tank decks through the storm, and Nick stooped to the
radarscope. The screen glowed and danced and flickered with ghost
images and trash - he wasn't too certain if even Warlock's image was
constant, the range seemed to be opening, as though the tow-line had
parted. He straighten
ed
up and stood balanced on the balls of his feet,
reassuring himself by the feel of the deck that Golden
Dawn was
still
under tow
.
He could feel by the way she resisted the wind and the sea
that the tow was still good.

Yet there was no means of telling their
p
osition. The satellite
navigational system was completely blanketed
,
the radio waves were
distorted and diverted by tens of thousands of feet of electrical storm,
and the same forces were blanketing the marine radio beacons on the
American mainland.

The only indication was the ship's electronic log which gave Nicholas
the speed of the ship's hull through the water and the speed across the
sea bottom, and the depth finder which recorded the water under her
keel.

For the first two hours of the tow, Warlock had been able to pull the
ship back towards the main channel at three and a half knots, and slowly
the water had become deeper until they had i 5o fathoms under them.

Then as the wind velocity increased, the windage of Golden
Dawn
’
s
s
uperstructure had acted as a vast mainsail and the storm had taken
control. Now, despite all the power in Warlock's big twin propellers,
both tug and tanker were being pushed once more back towards the
100-fathom line and the American mainland.

‘
Where is Sea Witch?
’
Nicholas wondered, as he stared helplessly at the
gauges. They were going towards the shore at a little over two knots,
and the bottom was shelving steeply. Sea Witch might be the ace that
took the trick, if she could reach them through these murderous seas and
savage winds, and if she could find them in this wilderness of mad air
and water.

Again, Nicholas groped his way to the communications room, and still
clinging to the bulkhead with one hand he thumbed the microphone.

‘
Sea Witch. Sea Witch. This is Warlock. Calling Sea Witch.
’

He
listened then, trying to tune out the snarl and crackle of static,
crouching over the set. Faintly he thought he heard a human voice, a
scratchy whisper through the interference and he called again and
listened, and called again.
There was the voice again, but so indistinct he could not make out a
single word.

Above his head, there was a tearing screech of rending metal. Nicholas
dropped the microphone and staggered through on to the bridge.
There was another deafening banging and hammering and all of them stood
staring up at the metal roof of the bridge. It sagged and shook, there
was one more crash and then with a scraping, dragging rush, a confused
tangle of metal and wire and cable tumbled over the forward edge of the
bridge and flapped and swung wildly in the wind.

It took a moment for Nicholas to realize what it was.

‘
The radar antennae!
’
he shouted. He recognized the elongated dish of
the aerial, dangling on a thick coil of cable, then the wind tore that
loose also, and the entire mass of equipment flapped away like a giant
bat and was instantly lost in the teeming white curtains of the storm.

With two quick paces, he reached the radarscope, and one glance was
enough. The screen was black and dead.
They had lost their eyes now, and, unbelievably, the sound of the storm
was rising again.

It boomed against the square box of the bridge, and the men within it
cowered from its fury.

Then abruptly, Duncan was screaming something at Nicholas, and pointing
up at the master display of the control console. Nicholas, still
hanging on to the radarscope, roused himself with an effort and looked
up at the display. The speed across the ground had changed drastically.
It was now almost eight knots, and the depth was ninety-two fathoms
.