Hungry as the Sea (16 page)

However, in
Golden Adventurer’s
case the damage was extensive and as the hull was already flooded, there was no pressure differential to drive home the plug. Nick proposed to beat that by using an internal wire to haul the plug into the gash.

“It might work.” Beauty Baker was noncommittal.

Nick took the second rum at a gulp, dropped the towel and reached for his working gear laid out on the bunk. “Let’s get power on her before the blow hits us,” he suggested mildly, and Baker lumbered to his feet and stuffed the Bundaberg bottle into his back pocket.

“Listen, sport,” he said. “All that guff about you being a Pommy, don’t take it too seriously.”

“I won’t,” said Nick. “Actually, I was born and educated in Blighty, but my father’s an American. So that makes me one also.”

“Christ,” Beauty hitched disgustedly at his waist with both elbows, “if there’s anything worse than a bloody Pom, it’s a goddamned Yank.”

Now that Nick was certain that the bottom of the bay was clean and free of underwater snags, he handled
Warlock
boldly but with a delicately skilful touch which David Allen watched with awe. Like a fighting cock, the
Warlock
attacked the thicker ice line along the shore, smashing free huge lumps and slabs, then washing them clear with the propellers, giving herself space to work about
Golden Adventurer’s
stern.

The ominous calm of both sea and air made the work easier, although the vicious little current working below
Adventurer’s
stern complicated the transfer of the big alternator.

Nick had two Yokohama fenders slung from
Warlock’s
side, and the bloated plastic balloons cushioned the contact of steel against steel as Nick laid
Warlock
alongside the stranded liner, holding her there with delicate adjustments of power and rudder and screw pitch.

Beauty Baker and his working party, swaddled in heavy Antarctic gear, were already up on the catwalk of
Warlock’s
forward gantry, seventy feet above the bridge and overlooking
Adventurer’s
sharply canted deck. As Nick nudged
Warlock
in, they dropped the steel boarding-ladder across the gap between the two ships and Beauty led them across in single file, like a troop of monkeys across the limb of a forest tree.

“All across,” the Third Officer confirmed for Nick, and then added, “Glass has dropped again, sir. Down to 1005.”

“Very well.” Nick drew
Warlock
gently away from the liner’s stern, and held her fifty feet off. Only then did he flick his eyes up at the sky. The midnight sun had turned into a malevolent jaundiced yellow, while the sun itself was a ball of dark satanic red above the peaks of Cape Alarm, and it seemed that the snowfields and glaciers were washed with blood.

“It’s beautiful.” Suddenly the girl was beside him. The top of her head was on a level with his shoulder, and in the ruddy light, her thick roped hair glowed like newly minted sovereigns in red gold. Her voice was low and a little husky with shyness, and touched a chord of response in Nick, but when she lifted her face to him he saw how young she was. “I came to thank you,” she said softly. “It’s the first chance I’ve had.”

She wore baggy, borrowed men’s clothing that made her look like a little girl dressing up, and her face, free of cosmetics, had that waxy plastic glow of youth, like the polished skin of a ripe apple. Her expression was solemn and there were traces of her recent ordeal beneath her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Nick sensed the tension and nervousness in her.

“Angel wouldn’t let me come before,” she said, and suddenly she smiled. The nervousness vanished and it was the direct warm unselfconscious smile of a beautiful child that has never known rejection. Nick was shocked by the strength of his sudden physical desire for her, his body moved, clenching like a fist in his groin, and he felt his heart pound furiously in the cage of his ribs.

His shock turned to anger, for she looked but fourteen or fifteen years of age; almost she seemed as young as his own son, and he was shamed by the perversity of his attraction. Since the good bright times with Chantelle, he had not experienced such direct and instant involvement with a woman. At the thought of Chantelle, his emotions collapsed in a disordered tangle, from which only his lust and his anger emerged clearly.

He cupped the anger to him, like a match in a high wind, it gave him strength again. Strength to thrust this aside, for he knew how vulnerable he still was and how dangerous a course had opened before him, to be led by this child woman. Suddenly he was aware that he had swayed bodily towards the girl and had been staring into her face for many long seconds, that she was meeting his gaze steadily and that something was beginning to move in her eyes like cloud shadow across the sunlit surface of a green mountain lake. Something was happening which he could not afford, could not chance — and then he realized also that the two young deck officers were watching them with undisguised curiosity, and he turned his anger on her.

“Young lady,” he said. “You have an absolute genius for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And his tone was colder and more remote than even he had intended it.

Before he turned away from her, he saw the moment of her disbelief turn to chagrin, and the green eyes misted slightly. He stood stiffly staring down the fore-dec where David Allen’s team was opening the forward salvage hold.

Nick’s anger evaporated almost at once, to be replaced by dismay. He realized clearly that he had completely alienated the girl and he wanted to turn back to her and say something gracious that might retrieve the situation, but he could think of nothing and instead lifted the hand microphone to his lips and spoke to Baker over the VFH radio.

“How’s it going, Chief?” There were ten seconds of delay, and Nick was very conscious of the girl’s presence near him.

“Their emergency generator has burned out, it will need two days work to get it running again. We’ll have to take on the alternator,” Beauty told him.

“We are ready to give it to you,” Nick told him, and then called David allen on the foredeck.

“Ready, David?”

“All set.”

Nick began edging
Warlock
back towards the finer’s towering stern, and now at last he turned back to the girl. Unaccountably, he now wanted her approbation, so his smile was ready — but she had already gone, taking with her that special aura of brightness.

Nick’s voice had a jagged edge to it as he told David Allen, “Let’s do this fast and right, Number One.”
Warlock
nuzzled
Adventurer’s
stern, the big black Yokoharna fenders gentling her touch, and on her fore-dec the winch whined shrilly, the lines squealing in their blocks and from the open salvage hatch the four-ton alternator swung out. It was mounted on a sledge for easy handling.

The diesel tanks were charged and the big motor primed and ready to start It rose swiftly, dangling from the tall gantry, and a dozen men synchronized their efforts, in those critical moments when it hung out over
Warlock’s
bows. A nasty freaky little swell lifted the tug and pushed her across, for the dangling burden was already putting a slight list on her, and it would have crashed into the steel side of the liner, had not Nick thrown the screws into reverse thrust and given her a burst of power to hold her off. The instant the swell subsided, he closed down and slid the pitch to fine forward, pressing the cushioned bows lightly back against
Adventurer’s
side.

“He’s good!” David Allen watched Nicholas work. “He’s better than old Mac ever was.”

Mackintosh,
Warlock’s
previous skipper, had been careful and experienced, but Nicholas Berg handled the ship with the flair and intuitive touch that even Mac’s vast experience could never have matched.

David Allen pushed the thought aside and signalled the winch man. The huge dangling machine dropped with the control of a roosting seagull on to the liner’s deck. Baker’s crew leapt on it immediately, releasing the winch cable and throwing out the tackle, to drag it away on its sledge.

Warlock drew off, and when Baker’s crew was ready, she went in to drop another burden, this time one of the highspeed centrifugal pumps which would augment
Golden Adventurer’s
own machinery — if Baker could get that functioning. It went up out of
Warlock’s
forward hold, followed ten minutes later by its twin.

“Both pumps secured.” Baker’s voice had a spark of jubilation in it, but at that moment a shadow passed over the ship, as though a vulture wheeled above on wide-spread pinions, and as Nick glanced up he saw the men on the foredeck lift their heads also.

It was a single cloud seeming no bigger than a man’s fist, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above them, but it had momentarily obscured the lowering sun, before scuttling on furtively down the peaks of Cape alarm.

There is still much to do, Nick thought, and he opened the bridge door and stepped out on to the exposed wing. There was no movement of air, and the cold seemed less intense although a glance at the glass confirmed that there were thirty degrees still of frost. No wind here, but high up it was be wind.

“Number One, Nick snapped into the microphone. What’s going on down there - do you think this is your daddy’s yacht?”

And David Allen’s team leapt to the task of closing down the forward hatch, and then tramped back to the double salvage holds on the long stern quarter.

“I am transferring command to the stern bridge.” Nick told his deck officers and hurried back through the accommodation area to the second enclosed bridge, where every control and navigational aid was duplicated, a unique feature of salvage-tug construction where so much of the work took place on the afterdeck.

This time from the aft gantries, they lifted the loaded ballets of salvage gear on to the liner’s deck, another eight tons of equipment went aboard
Golden Adventurer
. Then they pulled away and David Allen battened down again.

When he came on to the bridge stamping and slapping his own shoulders, red-cheeked and gasping from the cold, Nick told him immediately. “Take command, David, I’m going on board.” Nick could not bring himself to wait out the uncertain period while Beauty Baker put power and pumps into action. Anything mechanical was Baker’s responsibility, as seamanship was strictly Nick’s, but it could take many hours yet, and Nick could not remain idle that long.

From high on the forward gantry, Nick looked out across that satiny ominous sea. It was a little after midnight now and the sun was half down behind the mountains, a two dimensional disc of metal heated to furious crimson. The sea was sombre purple and the ice-bergs were sparks of brighter cherry red. From this height he could see that the surface of the sea was crenellated, a small regular swell spreading across it like ripples across a pond, from some disturbance far out beyond the horizon.

Nick could feel the fresh movement of
Warlock’s
hull as she rode this swell, and suddenly a puff of wind hit Nick in the face like the flit of a bat’s wing, and the metallic sheen of the sea was scoured by a cat’s-paw of wind that scratched at the surface as it passed. He pulled the draw-suing of the hood of his anorak up more tightly under his chin and stepped out on to the open boarding-ladder, like a steeplejack, walking upright and balancing lightly seventy feet above
Warlock’s
slowly rolling foredeck. He jumped down on to
Golden Adventurer’s
steeply canted, ice-glazed deck and saluted
Warlock’s
bridge far below in a gesture of dismissal.

Chapter 8

“I tried to warn you, dearie,” said Angel gently, as she entered the steamy galley, for with a single glance he was aware of Samantha’s crestfallen air. “He tore you up, didn’t he?”

“What are you talking about?” She lifted her chin, and the smile was too bright and too quick. “What do you want me to do?”

“You can separate that bowl of eggs,” Angel told her, and stooped again over twenty pounds of red beef, with his sleeves rolled to the elbows about his thick and hairy arms, clutching a butcher’s knife in a fist like that of Rocky Marciano.

They worked in silence for five minutes, before Samantha spoke again. “I only tried to thank him —,” and again there was a grey mist in her eyes.

“He’s a lower-deck pig,” Angel agreed.

“He is not,” Samantha came in hotly. “He’s not a pig.”

“Well, then, he’s a selfish, heartless bastard — with jumped-up ideas.”

“How can you say that?” Samantha’s eyes flashed now. “He is not selfish - he went into the water to get me!”

Then she saw the smile on Angel’s lips and the mocking quizzical expression in his eyes, and she stopped in confusion and concentrated on cracking the egg shells and slopping the contents into the mixing basin.

“He’s old enough to be your father,” Angel needled her, and now she was really angry; a ruddy flush under the smooth gloss of her skin made the freckles shine like gold dust.

“You talk the most awful crap, Angel.”

“God, dearie, where did you learn that language?”

“Well, you’re making me mad.” She broke an egg with such force that it exploded down the front of her pants. “Oh, shit!” she said, and stared at him defiantly. Angel tossed her a dish-cloth, she wiped herself violently and they went on working again.

“How old is he?” she demanded at last. “A hundred and fifty?”

“He’s thirty-eight,” Angel thought for a moment, “or thirty-nine.”

“Well, smart arse,” she said tartly, “the ideal age is half the man’s age, plus seven.”

“You aren’t twenty-six, dearie!” Angel said gently.

“I will be in two years time!” she told him.

“You really want him badly, hey? A fever of lust and desire?”

“That’s nonsense, Angel, and you know it. I just happen to owe him a rather large debt — he saved my life, — but as for wanting him, ha!” She dismissed the idea with a snort of disdain and a toss of her head.