Hungry as the Sea (29 page)

Standing beneath the bulk of
Golden Dawn
, she seemed to reach up into that low grey snow-sky, like a mighty alp of steel. The men working on the giddy heights of her scaffolding were small as insects, and quite unbelievably, as Samantha stared up at them, a little torn streamer of wet grey cloud, coming up the Loire basin from the sea, blew over the ship, obscuring the top of her navigation bridge for a few moments.

“She reaches up to the clouds,” said Nick beside her, and the pride was in his voice as he turned back to Charles Gras. “She looks good?” It was a question, not a statement. “She looks like the ship I planned.”

“Come, Nicholas.” The little party picked its way through the chaos of the yard. The squeal of power cranes and the rumble of heavy steel transporters, the electric hissing crackle of the huge automatic running welders combined with the roaring gunfire barrage of the rivetters into a cacophony that numbed the senses. The scaffolding and hoist systems formed an almost impenetrable forest about the mountainous hull, and steel and concrete were glistening wet and rimmed with thin clear ice.

It was a long walk through the crowded yard, almost twenty minutes merely to round the tanker’s stern – and suddenly Nicholas stopped so abruptly that Samantha collided with him and might have fallen on the icy concrete, but he caught her arm and held her as he stared up at the bulbous stern.

It formed a great overhanging roof like that of a medieval cathedral, so that Nick’s head was flung back, and the grip on her arm tightened so fiercely that she protested. He seemed not to hear, but went on staring upwards.

“Yes,” Charles Gras nodded, and the lank black hair flopped like against his forehead. “That is one difference from the ship you designed.”

The propeller was in lustrous ferro-bronze, six-bladed, each shaped with the beauty and symmetry of a butterfly’s wing, but so enormous as to make the comparison laughable. It was so big that not even the bulk of
Golden Dawn’s
own hull could dwarf it, each separate blade was longer and broader than the full wingspan of a jumbo et airliner, a gargantuan sculpture in gleaming metal.

“One!” whispered Nick. “One only?”

“Yes,” Charles Gras agreed, “Not four – but one propeller only. Also, Nicholas, it is fixed pitch.” They were all silent as they rode up in the cage of the hoist. The hoist ran up the outside of the hull to the level of the main deck, and though the wind searched for them remorselessly through the open mesh of the cage, it was not the cold that kept them silent.

The engine compartment was an echoing cavern, harshly lit by the overhead floodlights, and they stood high on one of the overhead steel catwalks looking down fifty feet on to the boiler and condensers of the main engine. Nick stared down for almost five minutes. He asked no questions, made no but at last he turned to Charles Gras and nodded once curtly.

“All right. I’ve seen enough,” he said, and the engineer led them to the elevator station. Again they rode upwards.

It was like being in a modern office block – the polished chrome and wood panelling of the elevator, the carpeted passageways high in the navigation tower along which Charles Gras led them to the Master’s suite and unlocked the carved mahogany doorway with a key from his watch chain.

Jules Levoisin looked slowly about the suite and shook his head wonderingly. “Ah, this is the way to live,” he breathed. ‘Nicholas, I absolutely insist that the Master’s quarters of Sea Witch be decorated like this.”

Nick did not smile, but crossed to the view windows that looked for-ward along the tanker’s main deck to her round blunt unlovely prow a mile and a quarter away. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, legs apart, chin thrust out angrily and nobody else spoke while Charles Gras opened the elaborate bar and poured cognac into the crystal brandy balloons. He carried a glass to Nick who turned away from the window.

“Thank you, Charles, I need something to warm the chill in my guts.” Nick sipped the cognac and rolled it on his tongue as he looked slowly around the opulent cabin. It occupied almost half the width of the navigation bridge, and was large enough to house a diplomatic reception. Duncan Alexander had picked a good decorator to do the job, and without the view from the window it might have been an elegant Fifth Avenue New York apartment, or one of those penthouses high on the cliffs above Monte Carlo, overlooking the harbour.

Slowly Nick crossed the thick green carpet, woven with the house device, the entwined letters C and M for Christy Marine, and he stopped before the Degas in its place of honour above the marble fireplace. He remembered Chantelle’s bubbling joy at the purchase of that painting. It was one of Degas ballet pieces, soft, almost luminous light on the limbs of the dancers, and, remembering the unfailing delight that Chantelle had taken in it during the years, he was amazed that she had allowed it to be used on board one of the company ships, and that it was left here virtually unguarded and vulnerable. That painting was worth a quarter of a million pounds.

He leaned closer to it, and only then did he realize how clever a copy of the original it was. He shook his head in dismissal. “The owners were advised that the sea air may damage the original,” Charles Gras shrugged, and spread his hands deprecatingly, “and not many people would know the difference.”

That was typical of Duncan Alexander, Nicholas thought savagely. It could only be his idea, the sharp accountant’s brain. The conviction that it was possible to fool all of the people all of the time. Everybody knew that Chantelle owned that work, therefore nobody would doubt its authenticity. That’s the way Duncan Alexander would reason it. It could not be Chantelle’s idea. She had never been one to accept anything that was sham or dross; it was a measure of the power that he exerted over her, for her to go along with this cheap little fraud.

Nicholas indicated the forgery with his glass and spoke directly to charles Gras. “This is a cheat,” he spoke quietly, his anger contained and controlled, “but it is harmless.” Now he turned away from it and, with a wider gesture that embraced the whole ship, went on. “But this other cheat, this enormous fraud,” he paused to control the metallic edge that had entered his tone, going on quietly again, “this is a vicious, murderous gamble he is taking. He has bastardized the entire concept of the scheme. One propeller instead of four – it cannot manoeuvre a hull of these dimensions with safety in any hazardous situation, it cannot deliver sufficient thrust to avoid collision, to fight her off a lee shore, to handle heavy seas.” Nick stopped, and his voice dropped even lower, yet somehow it was more compelling. “This ship cannot, by all moral and natural laws, be operated on a single boiler.

“My design called for eight separate boilers and condensers, the standard set for the old White Star and Cunard Lines. But Duncan Alexander has installed a single boiler system. There is no back-up, no fail-safe – a few gallons of sea water in the system could disable this monster.” Nicholas stopped suddenly as a new thought struck him.

“Charles,” his voice sharper still, “the pod tanks, the design of the pod tanks. He hasn’t altered that, has he? He hasn’t cut the corners there? Tell me, old friend, they are still self-propelled, are they not?”

Charles Gras brought the Courvoisier bottle to where Nicholas stood, and when Nick would have refused the addition to his glass, Charles told him sorrowfully, “Come, Nicholas, you will need it for what I have to tell you now.” As he poured, he said, “the pod tankers, their design has been altered also.”

He drew a breath to tell it with a rush. “They no longer have their own propulsion units. They are now only dumb barges that must be docked and undocked from the main hull and manoeuvred only by attendant tugs.”

Nicholas stared at him, his lips blanched to thin white lines. “No. I do not believe it. Not even Duncan –”

“Duncan Alexander has saved forty-two million dollars by re-designing
Golden Dawn
and equipping her with only a single boiler and propeller.” Charles Gras shrugged again. “And forty-two million dollars is a lot of money.”

Chapter 17

There was a pale gleam of wintry sunlight that flickered through the low grey cloud and lit the fields not far from the River Thames with that incredible vivid shade of engis green.

Samantha and Nicholas stood in a thin line of miserably cold parents and watched the pile of struggling boys across the field in their coloured jerseys; the light blue and black of Eton, the black and white of St Paul’s, were so muddied as to be barely distinguishable.

“What are they doing?” Samantha demanded, holding the collar of her coat around her ears.

“It’s called a scrum,” Nick told her. “That’s how they decide which team gets the ball.”

“Wow. There must be an easier way.”

There was a flurry of sudden movement and the slippery egg-shaped ball flew back in a lazy curve that was snapped up by a boy in the Etonian colours. He started to run.

“It’s Peter, isn’t it?” cried Samantha.

“Go it, Peter boy!” Nick roared, and the child ran with the ball clutched to his chest and his head thrown back. He ran strongly with the reaching coordinated stride of an older boy, swerving round a knot of his opponents, leaving them floundering in the churned mud, and angling across the lush thick grass towards the white-painted goal line, trying to reach the corner before a taller more powerfully built lad who was pounding across the field to intercept him.

Samantha began to leap up and down on the same spot, shrieking wildly, completely uncertain of what was happening, but wild with excitement that infected Nicholas.

The two runners converged at an angle which would bring them to the white line at the same moment, at a point directly in front of where Nick and Samantha stood.

Nick saw the contortion of his son’s face, and realized that this was a total effort. He felt a physical constriction of his own chest as he watched the boy drive himself to his utmost limits, the sinews standing out in his throat, his lips drawn back in a frozen rictus of endeavour that exposed the teeth clenched in his jaw. From infancy, Peter Berg had brought to any task that faced him the same complete focus of all his capabilities.

Like his grandfather, old Arthur Christy, and his own father, he would be one of life’s winners. Nick knew this instinctively, as he watched him run. He had inherited the intelligence, the comeliness and the charisma, but he bolstered all that with this unquenchable desire to succeed in all he did. The single-minded determination to focus all his talents on the immediate project. Nick felt the pressure in his chest swell. The boy was all right, more than all right, and pride threatened to choke him.

Sheer force of will had driven Peter Berg a pace ahead of his bigger, longer-legged adversary, and now he leaned forward with the ball held in both hands, arms fully extended, reaching for the line to make the touch-down.

He was ten feet from where Nick stood, a mere instant from success, but he was unbalanced, and the St Paul’s boy dived at him, crashing into the side of his chest, the impact jarring and brutal, hurling Peter out of the field of play with the ball spinning from his hands and bouncing away loosely, while Peter smashed into the earth on both knees, then rolled forward head over heels, and sprawled face down on the soggy turf.

“It’s a touch-down!” Samantha was still leaping up and down.

“No, said Nick. No, it isn’t.” Peter Berg dragged himself upright. His cheek was streaked with chocolate mud and both his knees were running blood, the skin smeared open by the coarse grass.

He did not glance down at his injuries, and he shrugged away the St Paul boy’s patronizing hand, holding himself erect against the pain as he limped back on to the field. He did not look at his father, and the moisture that filled his eyes and threatened to flood over the thick dark lashes were not tears of pain, but of humiliation and failure, With an overwhelming feeling of kinship, Nick knew that for his son those feelings were harder to bear than any physical agony.

When the game ended he came to Nicholas, all bloodied and mud-smeared, and shook hands solemnly. “I am so glad you came, sir,” he said. “I wish you could have watched us win.”

Nick wanted to say: “It doesn’t matter, Peter, it’s only a game.” But he did not. To Peter Berg, it mattered very deeply, so Nicholas nodded agreement and then he introduced Samantha.

Again Peter shook hands solemnly and startled her by calling her, “M’am.”

But when she told him, Hi, Pete. A great game, you deserved to slam them, he smiled, that sudden dazzling irresistible flash that reminded her so of Nicholas that she felt her heart squeezed. Then when the boy hurried away to shower and change, she took Nick’s arm.

He’s a beautiful boy, but does he always call you “sir”?

“I haven’t seen him in three months. It takes us both a little while to relax. Three months is a long time It’s all tied up by the lawyers. Access and visiting-rights what’s good for the child, not what’s good for the parents.”

“Today was a special concession from Chantelle, but I still have to deliver him to her at five o’clock. Not five past five, five o’clock.”

They went to the Cockpit teashop and Peter startled Samantha again by pulling out her chair and seating her formally. While they waited for the best muffins in Britain to be brought to the table, Nicholas and Peter engaged each other in conversation that was stiff with selfconsciousness.

“Your mother sent me a copy of your report, Peter, I cannot tell you how delighted I was.”

“I had hoped to do better, sir. There are still three others ahead of me.” And Samantha ached for them. Peter Berg was twelve years of age. She wished he could just throw his arms around Nicholas’ neck and say, “Daddy, I love you,” for the love was transparent, even through the veneer of publicschool manners. It shone behind the thick dark lashes that fringed the boy’s golden brown eyes, and glowed on the cheeks still as creamy and smooth as a girl’s.

She wanted desperately to help them both, and on inspiration she launched into an account of
Warlock’s
salvage of
Golden Adventurer
, a tale with emphasis on the derring do of
Warlock’s
Master, not forgetting his rescue of Samantha Silver from the icy seas of Antarctica.