Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (83 page)

But this fireball was spawned by a quarter of a million tons of volatile
liquids.

‘
Can't you get us further away?
’
Nicholas shouted above the thunder of
the hurricane. His mouth was only inches from Jules Levoisin's ear.

They were standing side by side, hanging from the overhead railing that
gave purcha
se on this wildly pitching deck.

‘
If I open the taps I will
part the tow wire,
’ Jules shouted back.

Sea Witch was alternately
standing on her nose and then her tail. There was no forward view from
the bridge, only green washes of sea water and banks of spray.

The full force of the hurricane
w
as on them once more, and a glance at
the radarscope showed the glowing image of Golden Dawn's crippled and
bleeding hull only half a mile astern.

Suddenly the glass of the windows was obscured by an
impenetrable
blackness, and the
light in Sea Witch's navigation bridge was reduced to only the glow of
her fire-lights and the electronic instruments of her control console.

Jules Levoisin turned his face to Nicholas, his plump features haunted
by green shadows in the gloom.

‘
Smoke bank
,’
Nicholas
shouted an explanation. There
was no reek of the
filthy hydrocarbon in the bridge, for Sea Witch was shut down for fire
drill, all her ports and ventilators sealed, her internal
air-conditioning on a closed circuit, the air being scrubbed and
recharged with oxygen by the big
c
arrier until above the main engine
room.
‘We are directly down
wind of the Golden Dawn.
’

A fiercer rush of
the hurricane winds laid Sea Witch over on her side, the lee rail deep
under the racing green sea, and held her there, unable to rise against
the careless might of the storm for many minutes. Her crew hung
desperately from any hand hold, the irksome burden of her tow helping to
drag her down further; the propellers found no grip in the air, and her
engines screamed in anguish.

But Sea Witch had been built to live in any sea, and the moment the wind
hesitated, she fought off the water that had come aboard and began to
swing back.

‘
Where is Warlock?
’
Jules bellowed anxiously. The danger of collision
preyed upon him constantly, two ships and their elephantine tows
manoeuvring closely in confined hurricane waters was nightmare on top of
nightmare.

‘
Ten miles east of us.
’
Nicholas picked the other tug's image out of the
trash on the radarscope.
‘
They had a start, ahead of the wind
-‘

He would
have gone on, but the boiling bank of hydrocarbon smoke that surrounded
Sea Witch turned to fierce white light, a light that blinded every man
on the bridge as though a photograph flashlight had been fired in his
face.

‘
Fireball!
’
Nicholas shouted, and, completely blinded, reached for the
remote controls of the water cannons seventy feet above the bridge on
Sea Witch's fire-control tower.

Minutes before, he had aligned the four water cannons, training them
down at their maximum angle of depression, so now as he locked down the
multiple triggers, Sea Witch deluged herself in a pounding cascade of
sea water.

Sea Witch was caught in a furnace of burning air, and despite the
torrents of water she spewed over herself, her paintwork was burned away
in instantaneous combustion so fierce that it consumed its own smoke,
and almost instantly the bare scorched metal of her exposed upperworks
began to glow with heat.

The heat was so savage that it struck through the insulated hull,
through the double glazing of the two-inch armoured glass of her bridge
windows, scorching and frizzling away Nicholas eyelashes and blistering
his lips as he lifted his face to it.

The glass of the bridge windows wavered and swam as they began to melt -
and then abruptly there was no more oxygen. The fireball had
extinguished itself, consumed everything in its twenty seconds of life,
everything from sea level to thirty thousand feet above it, a brief and
devastating orgasm of destruction.

It left a vacuum, a weak spot in the earth's thin skin of air, it formed
another low pressure system smaller, but much more intense, and more
hungry to be filled than the eye of hurricane Lorna itself.

It literally tore the guts out of that great revolving storm, setting up
counter winds and a vortex within the established system that ripped it
apart.

New gales blew from every
p
oint about the fireball's vacuum, swiftly
beginning their own dervish spirals and twenty miles short of the
mainland of Florida, hurricane Lorna checked her mindless, blundering
charge, fell in upon herself and disintegrated into fifty different
willy
-
nilly squalls and whirlpools of air that collided and split again,
slowly degenerating into nothingness.

On a morning in April in Galveston roads, the salvage tug Sea Witch
dropped off tow to four smaller harbour tugs who would take the Golden
Dawn No. 3 Pod tank up the narrows to the Orient Amex discharge
installation below Houston.

Her sister ship Warlock, Captain David Allen Commanding, had dropped off
h
is tandem tow of No. 1 and No.
2 pod tanks to the same tugs
forty-eight hours previously.

Between the two ships, they had made good salvage under Lloyd's Open
Form of three-quarters of a million tons of crude petroleum valued at
$85-5
U.S. a ton. To the prize would be added
the value of the three tanks themselves - not less than sixty-five million dollars all told,
Nicholas calculated, and he owned both ships and the full share of the
salvage award. He had not sold to the Shiekhs yet, though for every day
of the tow from Florida Straites to Texas there had been frantic telex
messages from James Teacher in London. The Sheikhs were desperate to
sign now, but Nicholas would let them wait a little longer.

Nicholas stood on the open wing of Sea Witch's bridge and watched the
four smaller harbour tugs bustling importantly about their ungainly
charge.

He lifted the cheroot to his lips carefully, for they were still
blistered from the heat of the fireball - and he pondered the question
of how much he had achieved, apart from spectacular riches.

He had reduced the spill from a million to a quarter of a million tons
of cad-rich crude, and he had burned it in a fireball. Nevertheless,
there had been losses, toxins had been lifted high above the fireball.
They had spread and settled across Florida as far as Tampa and
Tallahassee, poisoning the pastures and killing thousands of head of
domestic stock. But the American authorities had been quick to extend
the hurricane emergency procedures.

There had been no loss of human life. He had achieved that much.

Now he had delivered the salvaged pod tanks to Orient Amex. The new
cracking process would benefit all mankind, and nothing that Nicholas
could do would prevent men carrying the cad-rich crudes of El Barras
across the oceans. But would they do so in the same blindly
irresponsible manner that Duncan Alexander had attempted?

He knew then with utter certainty that it was his appointed life's work,
from now on, to try and ensure that they did not. He knew how he was to
embark upon that work. He had the wealth that was necessary, and Tom
Parker had given him the other instruments to do the job.

He knew with equal certainty, who would be his companion in that life's
work - and standing on the fire
-
scorched deck of the gallant little
vessel he had a vivid image of a golden girl who walked forever beside
him in sunlight and in laughter.

‘
Samantha.
’

He said her name aloud just once, and suddenly he was very
eager to begin.