Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (16 page)

He had time then to realize how exquisitely beautiful was the ice roof;
translucent, wonderously carved and sculptured - and suddenly he
remembered standing hand in hand with Chantelle beneath the arched roof
of the Chartres cathedral, staring up in awe. The pain in his chest
subsided, the need to breathe passed, but he did not recognize that as
the sign of mortal danger, nor the images that formed before his eyes as
the fantasy of a brain deprived of oxygen and slowly dying.

Chantelle's face was before him then, glowing hair soft and thick and
glossy as a butterfly's wing, huge dark eyes and that wide mouth so full
of the promise of delight and warmth and love.

‘
I loved you
,’
he thought.
‘
I really loved you.
’

And again the image changed. He saw again the incredible slippery
explosive liquid burst with which his son was born, heard that queru
l
ous
cry as
he dangled pink and
wet and hairless from the rubber-gloved hand, and
felt again the soul-consuming wonder and joy.

‘
A drowning man
–‘
Nick recognized at last what was happening to him. He
knew then he was dying, but the panic had passed, as the cold had passed
also, and the terror. He swam on, dreamlike, into the green mists. Then
he realized that his own legs were no longer moving; he lay relaxed not
breathing, not feeling, and it was Baker's body that was thrusting and
working against him.

Nick peered into the glass visor still only inches from his eyes, and he
saw that Baker's face was set and determined. He was gulping the pure
sweet oxygen and gained strength with each breath, driving on strongly.

‘
You beauty
,’
whispered Nick dreamily, and felt the water shoot into his
throat, but there was no pain.

Another im
age formed before him, an Arrow
head-class yacht with
spinnaker set, running free across a bright Mediterranean sea, and his
son at the tiller, the dense tumble of curls that covered his small neat
head fluttering in the wind, and the same velvety dark eyes as his
mother's in the sun-tanned oval of his face as he laughed.

‘
Don't let her run by the lee, Peter
,’
Nicholas wanted to shout to his
son, but the image faded into blackness. He thought for a moment that
he had passed into unconsciousness, but then he realized suddenly that
it was the black rubber bottom of the Zodiac only inches from his eyes,
and that the rough hands that dragged him upwards, lifting him and
tearing loose the fastening of his helmet, were not part of the fantasy.

Propped against the pillowed gunwale of the Zodiac, held by the two
boatmen from falling backwards, the first breaths of sub-zero air were
too rich for his starved lungs, and Nick coughed and vomited weakly down
the front of his suit.

Nick came out of the shower cabinet. The cabin was thick with steam,
and his body glowed dull angry red from the almost boiling water. He
wrapped the towel around his waist as he stepped through into his night
cabin.

Baker slouched in the armchair at the foot of his bunk.
He wore fresh overalls, his hair stood up in little damp spikes around
the shaven spot where Angel's cat-gut stitches still held the scabbed
wound closed. One of the side frames of his spectacles had snapped
during those desperate minutes below Golden Adventurer's stern, and
Baker had repaired it with black insulating tape.

He held two glasses in his left hand, and, a big flat brown bottle of
liquor in the other. He poured two heavy slugs into the glasses as Nick
paused in the bathroom door, and the sweet, rich aroma smelled like the
sugar-cane fields of northern Queensland.

Baker passed a glass to Nick, and then showed him the bottle's yellow
label.

‘
Bundaberg rum
,’
he announced, the dinky die stuff, sport!

Nick recognized both the offer of liquor and the salutation as probably
the highest accolade the chief would ever give another human being. Nick
sniffed the dark honey-brown liquor and then took it in a single toss,
swirled it once around his mouth, swallowed, shuddered like a spaniel
shaking off water droplets, exhaled and said:
‘
It's still the finest rum
in the world.
’
Dutifully, he said what was expected of him, and held out
his glass.

‘
The Mate asked me to give you a message,
’
said Baker as he poured another
shot for each of them.
‘Glass hit 1035 and now it‘
s diving like a dingo
into its hole - back to 102
0 already. It's going to blow - is it ever
going to blow!
’

They regarded each other over the rims of the glasses.

‘
We've wasted almost two hours
,
Beauty,
’
Nick told him, and Baker blinked
at the unlikely name, then grinned crookedly as he accepted it.

‘
How are you going to plug that hull?
’

‘
I've got ten men at work already. We are going to fother a sail into a
collision mat.
’
Baker blinked again, then shook his head in disbelief.

‘
That's Hornblower stuff
-‘

‘
The Witch of Endor
,’
Nick agreed.
‘
So you can
read?
’

‘
You haven't got pressure to drive it home
,’
Baker objected. The trapped
air from the engine room will blow it out.
’

‘
I'm going to run a wire down
the ventilation shaft of the engine room and out through the gash. We'll
fix the collision mat outside the hull and winch it home with the wire.
’

Baker stared at him for five seconds while he examined the proposition.
A sail was fothered by threading the thick canvas with thousands of
strands of unravelled oakum until it resembled a huge shaggy doormat.
When this was placed over an aperture below a ship's waterline, the
pressure of water forced it into the hole, and the water swelled the
mass of fibre until it formed an almost watertight plug.

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.
‘I
f 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 Warlocks 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
C
hantelle, 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
w
as 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.