Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (9 page)

‘
I'm not going to die
,’
she told herself
firmly.
’
I refuse to just lie
down and die
,’
and she struggled up onto her knees.
It felt as though she wore a rucksack filled with lead, such was the
physical weight of her despair.

She crawled to the central locker that held all their emergency rations
and equipment.

The emergency locator transmitter was packed in polyurethane and her
fingers were clumsy with cold and the thick mittens, but at last she
brought it out. It was the size of a cigar-box, and the instructions
were printed on the side of it. She did not need to read them, but
switched on the set and replaced it in its slot. Now for forty-eight
hours, or until the battery ran out, it would transmit a DF
homing-signal on 121,5 Mega Hertz.

It was possible, just possible, that the French tug might pick up that
feeble little beam, and track it down to its source. She set it out of
her mind, and devoted herself to the Herculean task of trying to heat
half a mug of water on the small solid-fuel stove without scalding
herself as she held the stove in her lap and balanced it against the
raft's motion. While she worked, she searched for the courage and the
words to tell the others of their predicament.

The Golden Adventurer, deserted of all human beings, her engines dead,
but with her deck lights still burning
,
her wheel locked hard over, and
the morse key in the radio room screwed down to transmit a single
unbroken pulse, drifted swiftly down on the black rock of Cape Alarm.

The rock was of so hard a type of formation that the cliffs were almost
vertical, and even exposed as they were to the eternal onslaught of this
mad sea, they had weathered very little. They still retained the sharp
vertical edges and the glossy polished planes of cleanly fractured
faults.

The sea ran in and hit the cliff without any check.
The impact seemed to jar the very air, like the concussion of bursting
high explosive, and the sea shot high in a white fury against the
unyielding rock of the cliff, before rolling back and forming a reverse
swell.

I
t was these returning echoes from the cliff that held Golden Adventurer
off the cliff. The shore was so steep-to that it dropped to forty
fathoms directly below the cliffs.
There was no bottom on which the ship could gut herself.

The wind was blanketed by the cliff and in the eerie stillness of air,
she drifted in closer and closer, rolling almost to her limits as the
swells took her broadside. Once she actually touched the rock with her
superstructure on one of those rolls, but then the echo-wave nudged her
away. The next wave pushed her closer, and its smaller weaker offspring
pushed back at her. A man could have jumped from a ledge on the cliff
on to her deck as she drifted slowly, parallel to the rock.

The cliff ended in an abrupt and vertical headland, where it had calved
into three tall pillars of serpentine, as graceful as the sculptured
columns of a temple of Olympian Zeus.

Again,
Gol
den Adventurer touched one of those pillars, she bumped it
lightly with her stern. It scraped paint from her side and crushed in
her rail, but then she was past.

The light bump was just sufficient to push her stern round, and she
pointed her bows directly into the wide shallow bay beyond the cliffs.

Here a softer, more malleable rock-formation had been eroded by the
weather, forming a wide beach of purple
-
black pebbles, each the size of a
man's head and water worn as round as cannon balls.

Each time the waves rushed up this stony beach, the pebbles struck
against each other with a rat
tling roar, and the brash of ro
tten and
mushy sea ice that filled the bay susurrated and clinked, as it rose and
fell with the sea.

Now Golden Adventurer was clear of the cliff, she was more fully in the
grip of the wind. Although the wind was dying, it still had force
enough to move her steadily deeper into the bay, her bows pointed
directly at the beach.

Unlike the cliff shore, the bay sloped up gently to the beach and this
allowed the big waves to build up into rounded sliding humps.

They did not curl and break into white water because the thick layer of
brash ice weighted and flattened them, so that these swells joined with
the wind to throw the ship at the beach with smoothly gathering impetus.

She took the ground with a great metallic groan of her straining plates
and canted over slowly, but the moving pebble beach moulded itself
quickly to her hull
,
giving gradually, as the waves and wind thrust her
higher and higher until she was firm aground; then, as the short night
ended so the wind fell further, and in sympathy the swells moderated
also and the tide drew back letting the ship settle more heavily.

By noon of that day, Golden Adventurer was held firmly by the bows on
the curved purple beach, canted over at an angle of
10
^°
. Only her after
end was still floating, rising and fall
ing
like a see-saw on the swell
patterns which still pushed in steadily, but the plummeting air
temperature was rapidly freezing the brash ice around her stern into a
solid sheet.

The ship stood very tall above the glistening wet beach.
Her upperworks were festooned with rime and long rapier like stalactites
of shining translucent ice hung from her scuppers and from the anchor
fair-leads.

Her emergency generator was still running, and although there was no
human being aboard her, her lights burned gaily and piped music played
softly through her deserted public rooms.

Apart from the rent in her side, through which the sea still washed and
swirled, there was no external evidence of damage, and beyond her the
peaks and valleys of Cape Alarm, so wild and fierce, seemed merely to
emphasize her graceful lines and to underline how rich a prize she was,
a luscious ripe plum ready for the picking.

Down in her radio room, the transmitting key continued to send out an
unbroken beam that could be picked up for five hundred miles around.

Two hours of deathlike sleep - and then Nick Berg woke with a wild
start, knowing that something of direct consequence was about to happen.
But it took fully ten seconds for him to realize where he was.

He stumbled from his bunk, and he knew he had not slept long enough. His
skull was stuffed with the cotton wool of fatigue, and he swayed on his
feet as he shaved in the shower, trying to steam himself awake with the
scalding water.

When he went out on to the bridge, the Trog was still at his equipment.
He looked up at Nick for a moment with his little rheumy pink eyes, and
it was clear that he had not slept at all. Nick felt a prick of shame
at his own indulgence.

‘
We are still inside La Mouette
,’
said the Trog, and turned back to his
set.
‘
I reckon we have an edge of almost a hundred miles.
’

Angel
appeared on the bridge, bearing a huge tray, and the saliva jetted from
under Nick's tongue as he smelled
it.

‘
I did a little special for your
brekker, Skipper
,’
said Angel.
‘
I call it "Eggs on Angel's Wings".
’

‘
I'm
buying
,’
said Nick, and turned back to the Trog with his mouth full and
chewing.
‘
What of the Adventurer?
’

‘
She's still sending a DF, but her
position has not
altered in almost three hours.’

‘
What do you mean?
’
Nick
demanded, and swallowed heavily.

‘
No change in position.
’

‘
Then she's aground
,’
Nick muttered, the food in
his hand forgotten, and at that moment David Allen hurried on to the
bridge still shrugging on his pea-jacket. His eyes were puffy and his
hair was hastily wetted and combed, but spiky at the back from contact
with his pillow. It had not taken him long to hear that the Captain was
on the bridge.
‘
And in one piece, if her transmitter is still sending.
’

‘
It looks like those Hail Marys worked, David.
’
Nick flashed his rare
smile and David slapped the polished teak top of the chart table.

‘
Touch wood, and don't dare the devil.
’

Nick felt his early despair
slipping away with his fatigue, and he took another big mouthful and
savoured it as he strode to the front windows and stared ahead.

The sea had flattened dramatically, but a weak and butter-yellow sun low
on the horizon gave no warmth, and Nick glanced up at the thermometer
and read the outside air temperature at minus thirty degrees.

Down here below 60
^°
south, the weather was so unstable, caught up on the
wheel of endlessly circling atmospheric depressions, that a gale could
rise in minutes and drop to a flat calm almost as swiftly. Yet foul
weather was the rule. For a hundred days and more each year, the wind
was at gale-force or above. The photographs of Antarctica always gave a
completely false impression
o
f fine days with the sun sparkling on
pristine snow fields and lovely towering icebergs. The truth was that
you cannot take photographs in a blizzard or a white-out.

Nick distrusted this calm, and yet found himself praying that it would
hold. He wanted to increase speed again, and was on the point of taking
that chance, when the officer of the watch called a sharp alteration of
course.

Ahead of them, Nick made out the sullen swirl of hidden ice below the
surface, like a lurking monster, and as Warlock altered course to avoid
it, the ice broke the surface.
Black ice, striated with bands of glacial mud, ugly and deadly.
Nick did not pass the order for the increase in speed.

‘
We should be raising Cape Alarm within the hour
,’
David Allen gloated
beside him.
‘
If this visibility holds.
’

‘
It won't
,’
said Nick.
‘
We'll have fog pretty soon
,’
and he indicated the
surface of the sea, which was beginning to steam, emitting ghostly
tendrils and eddies of seafret, as the difference between sea and air
temperature widened.

‘
We'll be at the Golden Adventurer in four hours more.
’
David was
bubbling with renewed excitement, and he slapped the teak table again.
‘
With your permission, sir, I'll go down and double-check the
rocket-lines and tow equipment.
’

While the air around them thickened
into a ghostly white soup, and blotted out all visibility to a few
hundred yards, Nick paced the bridge like a caged lion, his hands
clasped behind his back and a black unlit cheroot clamped between his
teeth. He broke his pacing every time that the Trog intercepted another
transmission from either Christy Marine, Jules Levoisin or Captain
Reilly on his VHF radio.

At midmorning, Reilly reported that he and his slow convoy had reached
Shackleton Bay without further losses, that they were taking full
advantage of the moderating weather to set up an encampment, and he
ended by urging La Mouette to keep a watch on 121,5 Mega Hertz to try
and locate the missing life-raft that had broken away during the night.
La Mouette did not acknowledge.