Seawitch (22 page)

"Bad news. There's not only no sign of your

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tanker, but our radar scanners show no signs of any vessel of that size within a radius of forty miles."

"Then, what the devil can have happened to her? I was speaking to her only two or three minutes ago."

"On her own call sign?"

"Yes, dammit"

*Then obviously she's in no trouble."

Lord Worth hung up without as much as a courtesy thank you. He glowered at Larsen and Mitchell as if what had happened had been their fault. He said at length: "I can only conclude that the captain of the Torbello has gone off his rocker."

Mitchell said: "And I conclude that he's under lock and key aboard his own ship.'*

Lord Worth was heavily ironic. "In addition to your many other accomplishments you've now become psychic."

"Your Torbello has been hijacked."

"Hijacked! Hijacked? Now you've gone off your rocker. Who ever heard of a tanker being hijacked?"

"Who ever heard of a jumbo jet being hijacked until the first one was? After what happened to the Crusader in Galveston, the captain of the Torbello would have been extremely leery of being approached, much less boarded, by any other vessel unless it were a craft with respectability beyond question. The only two such types

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of craft are naval or coast guard. WeVe heard that the Marine Gulf Corporation's survey vessel has been stolen. A lot of those survey vessels are ex-coast guard with landing space for a helicopter to carry out seismological pattern bombing. That ship was called the Hammond. With your connections you could find out about it in minutes."

Lord Worth did find out in minutes. He said: "So you're right." He was too dumbfounded even to apologize. "And this of course was the Tiburon that Cronkite sailed from Galveston. God only knows what name it goes under now. What next, I wonder?"

Mitchell said: "A call from Cronkite, I'd guess."

"What would he call me for?"

"Some tough demands, I'd say. I don't know."

Lord Worth was nothing if not resilient. He had powerful and influential friends. He called an admiral in naval headquarters in Washington and demanded that an air-sea search unit be dispatched immediately to the scene. The Navy apologetically said that they would have to obtain the permission of the Commander-in-Chief —that is, the President. The President, he knew, would profess a profound if polite degree of disinterest. Neither he nor Congress had any reason to love the oil companies who had so frequently flouted them—which was less than fair to Lord Worth, who had never flouted anyone in Wash-247

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ington in his life. More, the search almost certainly lay outside their jurisdictional waters. Besides, it was raining in the Gulf and black as the pit, and though their radar might well pick up a hundred ships in the area, visual identification would be impossible.

He tried the CIA. Then- disinterest was even more profound. In the several years past they had had their fingers badly burned in public and all their spare time was devoted to licking their wounds.

The FBI curtly reminded him that their activities were purely internal and that anyway they got seasick whenever they ventured on water.

Lord Worth considered making an appeal to the UN, but was dissuaded by Larsen and Miteh-elL Not only would the Arab states, Venezuela, Nigeria, every Communist country, and what now went by the name of the Third World—and they held the vast majority of votes hi the UN— veto any such suggestion: the UN had no legal power to initiate any such action. Apart from that, by that time the entire UN complex were probably hi bed anyway.

For once in his life, Lord Worth appeared to be at a loss. Life, it appeared, could hold no more for him. Lord Worth was discovering that, upon occasion, he could be as fallible as the next man.

A voice-over call came through. It was, as Mitchell had predicted it would be, Cronkite. He was glad to inform Lord Worth that there was

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no cause for concern over the Torbello, as she was in safe and sound hands.

"Where?" Had his daughter not been present, Lord Worth would undoubtedly have qualified his question with a few choice adjectives.

"I prefer not to specify exactly. Enough to say that she is securely anchored in the territorial waters of a Central American country. It is my intention to dispose of this oil to this very poor and oil-deficient country"—he did not mention that it was his intention to sell it at half price, which would bring in a few acceptable hundred thousands of dollars—"then take the tanker out to sea and sink it. Unless, of course—"

"Unless what?" Lord Worth asked. His voice had assumed a peculiar hoarseness.

"Unless you close down the Christmas tree on the Seawiteh and immediately stop all pumping and drilling."

"Fool."

"How's that?"

"Your thugs have already attended to that Haven't they told you?"

"I want proof. I want Mortensen."

Lord Worth said wearily: "Hold on. We'll get him/'

Mitchell went to fetch him. By the time he returned, overalled and masked, Mortensen had been thoroughly briefed. He confirmed to Cronkite that all pumping and drilling had stopped. Cronkite expressed his satisfaction and the radio

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link went dead. Mitchell removed the .38 from below Mortensen's ear and two of Palermo's men took him from the room. Mitchell took off his hood and Marina looked at him with a mixture of horror and incredulity.

She whispered: "You were ready to kill him." "Not at all. I was going to pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he was. I asked you to get off this rig."

35O

Chapter 9

Worth had barely begun to wipe his brow when two men hurried into the room. One was Palermo and the other was one of the rig crew, Simpson, whose duty it was to monitor the sensory instruments attached to the platform's legs and the tensioning anchor cables. He was obviously in a state of considerable agitation.

Lord Worth said: "What fresh horror does fate hold in store for us now?"

"Somebody below the rig, sir. My instruments have gone a bit haywire. Some object, almost certainly metallic, is ia intermittent contact with the western leg.**

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"There can be no doubt about this?" Simpson shook his head. "Seems damnably odd that Cronkite would try to bring down the Seawitch with his own men on board."

Mitchell said: "Maybe he doesn't want to bring it down, just damage the leg enough to destroy the buoyancy in the leg and the adjacent members and tilt the Seawitch so the drill and pump-hug mechanisms don't work. Maybe anything. Or maybe he would be prepared to sacrifice his own men to get you." He turned to Palermo. "I know you've got scuba equipment aboard. Show me." They left.

Marina said: "I suppose he's off to murder someone else. He's not really human, is he?"

Lord Worth looked at her without enthusiasm. "If you call being inhuman wanting to see that you don't die, then he's inhuman. There's only one person aboard this rig he really cares for, and you damned well know it. I never thought Fd be ashamed of a daughter of mine."

Palermo had, in fact, two trained scuba divers with him, but Mitchell chose only one to accompany him. Palermo was not a man to be easily impressed, but he had seen enough of Mitchell not to question his judgment. In remarkably quick time Mitchell and the other man, who went by the name of Sawyers, were dressed in scuba outfits and were equipped with reloadable compressed-air harpoon guns and sheath knives.

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They were lowered to the water by the only available means on such a giant TLP—a wire-mesh cage attached to the boom of the derrick crane. At water level they opened the hinged door, dived and swam to the giant western leg.

Simpson had made no mistake. They were indeed at work down there, two of them, attached by airlines and cables to the shadowy outline of a vessel some twenty feet above them. Both wore powerful headlamps. They_ were energetically engaged in attaching limpet mines, conventional magnetic mines and wraparound rolls of beehive amatol to the enormous leg. They had enough explosives there, Mitchell figured, to bring down the Eiffel Tower. Maybe Cronkite did intend to destroy the leg. That Cronkite was unhinged seemed more probable than not.

The two saboteurs were not only energetically engaged in their task, they were so exclusively preoccupied with it that they failed to notice the stealthy approach of Mitchell and Sawyers. The two scuba divers pressed their masks together, looked into each other's eyes—there was sufficient reflected light from the other divers to allow them to do this—and nodded simultaneously. Not much given to squeamishness where potential killers were concerned, they harpooned the two saboteurs through their backs. In both cases, death was instantaneous. Mitchell and Sawyers reloaded their compressed-air harpoons then, for

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good measure, sliced their two victims* breathing tubes, which also contained the communication wires.

On the Starlight, Easton and his crew were instantly aware that something had gone drastically wrong. The dead men were pulled up, the harpoons still imbedded in their backs, and as the corpses were being hauled over the gunwales two of the crew cried out in agony: Mitchell and Sawyers had surfaced and picked off two more targets. Whether either had been mortally or grievously injured was impossible to say, but far more than enough had happened for Easton to take off at speed, this time on his much faster diesels: the engines were admittedly noisy, but the darkness was so intense that it was impossible for the alerted gunners on the platform to obtain an accurate fix on them.

The two scuba divers, their own headlights now switched on, swam down to the spot where the mines and explosives had been attached to the legs. There were time fuses attached to both mines and explosives. Those they detached and let fall to the bottom of the ocean. For good measure they also removed the detonators. The explosives, now harmless, they unwound and let them follow the time fuses. The mines they prudently left where they were. Both men were explosives experts but not deep-water explosives experts. Mines, as many ghosts can attest, can be

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very tricky and unpredictable. They consist of TNT, amatol, or some such conventional explosive as the main charge. In their central tube they have a primer, which may consist of one of a variety of slow-burning explosives, and fitted to the top of the primer is a traveling detonator, activated by sea pressure, which usually consists of seventy-seven grains of fulminate of mercury. Even with this detonator removed, the primer can still detonate under immense pressure. Neither diver had any wish to blow up the pile-driven anchors or the tensioning cables attached to the anchors. Via the derrick crane they made their way back to the platform and reported to the radio room. They had to wait for some time before making their report, for Lord Worth was in a far from amicable telephone conversation with Cronkite. Marina sat apart, her hands clenched and her normally tanned face a grayish color. She looked at Mitchell, then averted her eyes as if she never wished to set eyes on him again, which, at the moment, she probably didn't. Cronkite was furious. "You murderous bastard, Worth." He was clearly unaware that he was talking in the presence of ladies. "Three of my men dead, harpooned through the back." Involuntarily, Marina looked at Mitchell again. Mitchell had the impression that he was either a monster from outer space or from the nethermost depths: at any rate, a monster.

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Lord Worth was no less furious. "It would be a pleasure to repeat the process—with you as the central figure this time."

Cronkite choked, then said with what might have been truth: "My intention was just temporarily to incapacitate the Seawitch without harming anyone aboard. But if you want to play it rough you'll have to find a new Seawitch in twenty-four hours. That's if you're fortunate enough to survive: I'm going to blast you out of the water."

Lord Worth was calmer now. "It would be interesting to know how you're going to achieve that. My information is that your warships have been ordered back to base."

"There's more than one way of blasting you out of the water." Cronkite sounded very sure of himself. "In the meantime I'm going to offload the Torbello's oil, then sink it." In point of fact, Cronkite had no intention of sinking the tanker: the Torbello was a Panamanian registered tanker, and Cronkite was not lacking in Panamanian friends. A tanker could be easily disposed of for a very considerable sum. The conversation, if such an acrimonious exchange could be so called, ended abruptly.

Mitchell said: "One thing's for sure. Cronkite is a fluent liar. He's nowhere near Central America. Not with that kind of reception. And we heard him talking to his friend Durand. He elected not to come on that helicopter flight—

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which lasted only fifteen minutes. He's lying out there somewhere just over the horizon."

Lord Worth said: "How did things go down there?"

"You heard what Cronkite said. There was no trouble on our part."

"Do you expect more?"

"Yeah. Cronkite sounds too damn confident for me,"

"How do you think it'll come?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. He might even try the same thing again."

Lord Worth was incredulous. "After what happened to him?"

"He may be counting on the unexpected. One thing Tm sure of. If he does try the same again he'll" use different tactics. I'm sure he won't try an air or submarine approach, if for no other reason than that he doesn't—he can't—have skilled men. So I don't think you'll need your radar or sonar watchers tonight. In any case, your radio operator may need a rest—after all, he's got an alarm call-up in his cabin. Td keep Simpson on duty, though. Just in case our friends try for one of the legs again."

Palermo said: "But they'd be waiting this time. They'd be operating close to the surface. They'd have armed guards waiting to protect the divers, maybe even infrared searchlights that we couldn't see from the platform. You and Sawyers were lucky the first time, and luck depends on sur-