Hungry as the Sea (62 page)
He straightened up again, dragging Duncan off his feet and the same instant dropped backwards with his full weight on to the deck. Duncan gasped and his arm fell away, as Nicholas bounced to his feet again, choking in the greasy billows of smoke, and he reached the ship’s side.
Below him, the gap between Sea Witch’s bows and the tanker’s side was rapidly widening and the thrust of the sea and the drag of the tug pulled them apart.
Nicholas vaulted on to the rail, poised for an instant and then jumped. He struck the deck and his teeth cracked together with the impact; his injured leg gave under him and he rolled once, then he was up on his hands and knees.
He looked up at
Golden Dawn
. She was completely enveloped now in the boiling column of black smoke. As the flames heated the leaking crude, so it burned more readily. The bank of smoke was shot through now with the satanic crimson of high, hot flame.
As Sea Witch sheered desperately away, the first rush of the storm hit them, and for a moment it smeared the smoke away, exposing the tanker’s high quarter-deck.
Duncan Alexander stood at the rail above the roaring holocaust of the tank-deck. He stood with his arms extended, and he was burning, his clothing burned fiercely and his hair was a bright torch of flame. He stood like a ritual cross, outlined in fire, and then slowly he seemed to shrivel and he toppled forward over the rail into the bubbling, spurting, burning cargo of the monstrous ship that he had built – and the black smoke closed over him like a funeral cloak.
As the crude oil escaping from the pierced pod tank fed the flames, so the heat built up swiftly, still sufficient to consume only the volatile aromatic spirits which constituted less than half the bulk of the cargo.
The heavy carbon elements, not yet hot enough to burn, boiled off in that solid black column of smoke, and as the returning winds of the hurricane raced over the
Golden Dawn
once more, so that filthy pall was mixed with air and lifted into the cloud bank of the storm, rising first a thousand, then ten, then twenty thousand feet above the surface of the ocean.
And still
Golden Dawn
burned, and the temperatures of the gas and oil mixture trapped in her hull rocketed steeply. Steel glowed red, then brilliant white, ran like molten wax, and then like water – and suddenly the flashpoint of heavy carbon smoke in a mixture of air and water vapour was reached in the womb of this mighty furnace.
Golden Dawm and her entire cargo turned into a fireball.
The steel and glass and metal of her hull disappeared in an instantaneous explosive combustion that released temperatures like those upon the surface of the sun. Her cargo, a quarter of a million tons of it, burned in an instant, releasing a white blooming rose of pure heat so fierce that it shot up into the upper stratosphere and consumed the billowing pall of its own hydrocarbon gas and smoke.
The very air burst into flame, the surface of the sea flamed in that white fireball of heat and even the clouds of smoke burned as the oxygen and hydrocarbon they contained exploded.
Once an entire city had been subjected to this phenomena of fireball, when stone and earth and air had exploded, and five thousand German citizens of the city of Cologne had been vaporized, and that vapour burned in the heat of its own release.
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 purchase 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 was 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 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 carrier 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 Point 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.
Chapter 53
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 his 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 $85-50 U.S. a ton. To the value of the three tanks the prize would be added 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 firescorched 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.
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