Hungry as the Sea (58 page)

Nobody spoke on
Warlock’s
bridge, they lifted their faces with the same awed expressions as worshippers in a lofty cathedral and they looked up at the skies. Low cloud raced above them, cloud that glowed and shone with that terrible ominous flare, Slowly the light faded and changed, turning a paler sickly greenish hue, like the shine on putrid meat.

Nicholas spoke first. “The Devil’s Beacon,” he said, and he wanted to rationalize it, to break the superstitious mood that gripped them all. It was merely the rays of the sun below the western horizon catching the cloud peaks of the storm and reflected downwards through the weak cloud cover of the trough but somehow he could not find the right words to denigrate that phenomenon that was part of the mariner’s lore, the malignant beacon that leads a doomed ship on to its fate.

The weird light faded slowly away leaving the night even darker and more foreboding than it had been before.

“David,” Nicholas thought quickly of something to distract his officers, “have we got a radar contact yet?” and the new Mate roused himself with a visible effort and crossed to the radarscope.

The range is very confused, he said, his voice still subdued, and Nicholas joined him at the screen. The sweeping arm lit a swirling mass of sea clutter, and the strange ghost echoes thrown up by electrical discharges within the approaching storm. The outline of the Florida mainland and of the nearest islands of the Grand Bahamas bank were firm and immediately recognizable. They reminded Nicholas yet again of how little sea-room there was in which to manoeuver his tugs and their monstrous prize.

Then, in the trash of false echo and sea clutter, his trained eye picked out a harder echo on the extreme limits of the set’s range. He watched it carefully for half a dozen revolutions of the radar’s sweep, and each time it was constant and clearer.

“Radar contact,” he said. “Tell
Golden Dawn
we are in contact, range sixty-five nautical miles. Tell them we will take on tow before midnight.” And then, under his breath, the old sailor’s qualifications, “God willing and weather permitting.”

The lights on
Warlock’s
bridge had been rheostatted down to a dull rose glow to protect the night vision of her officers, and the four of them stared out to where they knew the tanker lay. Her image on the radar was bright and firm, lying within the two mile ring of the screen, but from the bridge she was invisible.

In the two hours since first contact, the barometer had gone through its brief peak as the trough passed, and then fallen steeply.

From 1050 it had crashed to 1008 and was still plummeting, and the weather coming in from the east was blustering and squalling. The wind mourned about them on a forever rising note, and torrential rain obscured all vision outside an arc of a few hundred yards. Even
Warlock’s
twin searchlights, set seventy feet above the main deck on the summit of the fire-control gantry, could not pierce those solid white curtains of rain.

Nicholas groped like a blind man through the rain fog, using pitch and power to close carefully with
Golden Dawn
, giving his orders to the helm in a cool impersonal tone which belied the pale set of his features and the alert brightness of his eyes as he reached the swirling bank of rain.

Abruptly another squall struck Warlock. With a demented shriek, it heeled the big tug sharply and shredded the curtains of rain, ripping them open so that for a moment Nicholas saw
Golden Dawn
. She was exactly where he had expected her to be, but the wind had caught the tanker’s high navigation bridge like the mainsail of a tall ship, and she was going swiftly astern.

All her deck and port lights were burning, and she carried the twin red riding lights at her stubby masthead that identified a vessel drifting out of control. The following sea driven on by the rising wind piled on to her tank decks, smothering them with white foam and spray, so that the ship looked like a submerged coral reef.

“Half ahead both,” Nicholas told the helmsman. “Steer for her starboard side.” He closed quickly with the tanker, staying in visual contact now; even when the rain mists closed down again, they could make out the ghostly shape of her and the glow of her riding lights.

David Allen was looking at him expectantly and Nicholas asked, “What bottom?” without taking his eyes from the stricken ship.

“One hundred sixteen fathoms and shelving fast.” They were being blown quickly out of the main channel, on to the shallow ledge of the Florida littoral.

“I’m going to tow her out stern first,” said Nicholas, and immediately David saw the wisdom of it. Nobody would be able to get up into her bows to secure a tow-line, the seas were breaking over them and sweeping them with ten and fifteen feet of green water.

“I’ll go aft –” David began, but Nicholas stopped him.

“No, David. I want you here – because I’m going on board
Golden Dawn
!”

“Sir,” David wanted to tell him that it was dangerous to delay passing the towing cable – with that lee shore waiting.

“This will be our last chance to get passengers off her before the full hurricane hits us,” said Nicholas, and David saw that it was futile to protest. Nicholas Berg was going to fetch his son.

From the height of
Golden Dawn’s
towering navigation bridge, they could look directly down on to the main deck of the tug as she came alongside. Peter Berg stood beside his mother, almost as tall as she was. He wore a full life-jacket and a corduroy cap pulled down over his ears.

“It will be all right, he comforted Chantelle. Dad is here. It will be’just fine now.” And he took her hand protectively.

Warlock staggered and reeled in the grip of wind as she came up into the tanker’s lee, rain blew over her like dense white smoke and every few minutes she put her nose down and threw a thick green slice of sea water back along her decks.

In comparison to the tug’s wild action,
Golden Dawn
wallowed heavily, held down by the oppressive weight of a million tons of crude oil, and the seas beat upon her with increasing fury, as if affronted by her indifference.
Warlock
edged in closer and still closer.

Duncan Alexander came through from the communications room at the rear of the bridge. He balanced easily against
Golden Dawn’s
ponderous motion but his face was swollen and flushed with anger. “Berg is coming on board,” he burst out. “He’s wasting valuable time. I warned him that we must get out into deeper water.”

Peter Berg interrupted suddenly and pointed down at Warlock, “Look” he cried.

Nicholas checked himself, studied him for a long moment, and then smiled mirthlessly. “Nobody ever called you a coward, he nodded reluctantly. Other things – but not a coward. Stay if you will, we might need an extra hand.” Then to Peter, “Come, my boy.” And he led him towards the elevator.

At the quarter-deck rail, Nicholas hugged the boy, holding him in his arms, their cheeks pressed tightly together, and drawing out the moment while the wind cannoned and thrummed about their heads.

“I love you, Dad.”

“And I love you, Peter, more than I can ever tell you but you must go now.” He broke the embrace and lifted the child into the deep canvas bucket of the bosun’s chair, stepped back and windmilled his right arm. Immediately, the winch party in
Warlock’s
upperworks swung him swiftly out into the gap between the two ships and the nylon cable seemed as fragile and insubstantial as a spider’s thread.

As the two ships rolled and dipped, so the line tightened and sagged, one moment dropping the white canvas bucket almost to the water level where the hungry waves snatched at it with cold green fangs, and the next, pulling the line up so tightly that it hummed with tension, threatening to snap and drop the child back into the sea, but at last it reached the tug and four pairs of strong hands lifted the boy clear.

For one moment, he waved back at Nicholas and then he was hustled away, and the empty bosun’s chair was coming back.

Only then did Nicholas become aware that Chantelle was clinging to his arm and he looked down into her face. Her eyelashes were dewed and stuck together with the flying raindrops. Her face ran with wetness and she seemed very small and childlike under the bulky oilskins and life-jacket. She was as beautiful as she had ever been but her eyes were huge and darkly troubled.

“Nicholas, I’ve always needed you,” she husked. “But never as I need you now.” Her existence was being blown away on the wind, and she was afraid. “You and this ship are all I have left.”

“No, only the ship,” he said brusquely, and he was amazed that the spell was broken. That soft area of his soul which she had been able to touch so unerringly was now armoured against her. With a sudden surge of relief, he realized he was free of her, for ever. It was over; here in the storm, he was free at last.

She sensed for the fear in her eyes changed to real terror. “Nicholas, you cannot desert me now. Oh Nicholas, what will become of me without you and Christy Marine?”

“I don’t know,” he told her quietly, and caught the bosun’s chair as it came in over
Golden Dawn’s
rail. He lifted her as easily as he had lifted his son and placed her in the canvas bucket. “And to tell you the truth, Chantelle, I don’t really care,” he said, and stepping back, he windmilled his right arm.

The chair swooped out across the narrow water, swinging like a pendulum in the wind. Chantelle shouted something at him but Nicholas had turned away, and was already going aft in a lurching run to where the three volunteers were waiting.

He saw at a glance that they were big, powerful, competent-looking men. Quickly Nicholas checked their equipment, from the thick leather gauntlets to the bolt cutters and jemmy bars for handling heavy cable.

“You’ll do,” he said. “We will use the bosun’s tackle to bring across a messenger from the tug – just as soon as the last man leaves this ship.”

Working with men to whom the task was unfamiliar, and in rapidly deteriorating conditions of sea and weather, it took almost another hour before they had the main cable across from
Warlock
secured by its thick nylon spring to the tanker’s stern bollards – yet the time had passed so swiftly for Nicholas that when he stood back and glanced at his watch, he was shocked. Before this wind they must have been going down very fast on the land. He staggered into the tanker’s stern quarters, and left a trail of sea water down the passageway to the elevators,

On the bridge, Captain Randle was standing grim-faced at the helm, and Duncan Alexander snapped accusingly at him. “You’ve cut it damned fine.” A single glance at the digital print-out of the depth gauge on the tanker’s control console bore him out. They had thirty-eight fathoms of water under them now, and the
Golden Dawn
‘ s swollen belly sagged down twenty fathoms below the surface. They were going down very swiftly before the easterly gale winds.

It was damned fine, Nicholas had to agree, but he showed no alarm or agitation as he crossed to Randle’s side and unhooked the hand microphone. “David,” he asked quietly, “are you ready to haul us off?”

“Ready, sir,” David Allen’s voice came from the speaker above his head.

“I’m going to give you full port rudder to help your turn across the wind,” said Nicholas, and then nodded to Randle. “Full port rudder. Forty degrees of port rudder on,” Randle reported.

They felt the tiny shock as the tow-cable came up taut, and carefully
Warlock
began the delicate task of turning the huge ship across the rising gusting wind and then dragging her out tail first into the deeper water of the channel where she would have her best chance of riding out the hurricane.

It was clear now that
Golden Dawn
lay directly in the track of Lorna, and the storm unleashed its true nature upon them. Out there upon the sane and rational world, the sun was rising, but here there was no dawn, for there was no horizon and no sky. There was only madness and wind and water, and all three elements were so intermingled as to form one substance.

An hour – which seemed like a lifetime – ago, the wind had ripped away the anemonmeter and the weather-recording equipment on top of the navigation bridge, so Nicholas had no way of judging the wind’s strength and direction. Out beyond the bridge windows, the wind took the top off the sea; it took it off in thick sheets of salt water and lifted them over the navigation bridge in a shrieking white curtain that cut off visibility at the glass of the windows.

The tank deck had disappeared in the racing white emulsion of wind and water, even the railing of the bridge wings six feet from the windows was invisible. The entire superstructure groaned and popped and whimpered under the assault of the wind, the pressed aluminium bulkheads bulging and distorting the very deck flexing and juddering at the solid weight of the storm.

Through the saturated, racing, swirling air, a leaden and ominous grey light filtered, and every few minutes the electrical impulses generated within the sixty-thousand foot-high mountain of racing, spinning air released themselves in shattering cannonades of thunder and sudden brilliance of eye-searing white lightning.

There was no visual contact with Warlock. The massive electrical disturbance of the storm and the clutter of high seas and almost solid cloud and turbulence had reduced the radar range to a few miles, and even then was unreliable. Radio contact with the tug was drowned with buzzing squealing static. It was possible to understand only odd disconnected words from David Allen.

Nicholas was powerless, caged in the groaning, vibrating box of the navigation bridge, blinded and deafened by the unleashed powers of the heavens. There was nothing any of them could do.

Randle had locked the ultra-tanker’s helm amidships, and now he stood with Duncan and the three seamen by the chart-table, all of them clinging to it for support, all their faces pale and set as though carved from chalk.