Seawitch (7 page)

Its gasoline tanks, true, were empty, but its engine diesel fuel tanks were almost completely topped up. In normal circumstances ignited diesel does not explode but burns with a ferocious intensity. Within seconds the smoke-veined flames had risen to a height of two hundred feet, the height increasing with each moment until the

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whole city was bathed in a crimson glow, a phenomenon which the citizens of Galveston had never seen before and would almost certainly never see again. Even aboard the Tiburon the spectacle had an awe-inspiring and unearthly quality about it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped as the Crusader turned completely over on its side, the harbor waters quenching the flames into hissing extinction. Some patches of floating oil still flickered feebly across the harbor, but that was all that there was to it.

Clearly Lord Worth was going to require a new tanker, a requirement that presented quite a problem. In this area of a gross oversupply of tankers, any one of scores of laid-up supertankers could be had just through exercising enough strength to lift a telephone. But 50,000-ton tankers, though not a dying breed, were a dwindling breed, principally because the main shipyards throughout the world had stopped producing them. "Had" is the operative word. Keels of that size and even smaller were now being hastily laid down, but would not be in full operation for a year or two to come. The reason was perfectly simple. Supertankers on the Arabian Gulf-Europe run had to make the long and prohibitively expensive circuit around the Cape of Good Hope because the newly reopened Suez Canal could not accommodate their immense draft, a problem that presented no difficulties to

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smaller tankers. It was said, and probably with more than a grain of truth, that the notoriously wily Greek shipowners had established a corner on this particular market. The dawn was in the sky.

At that precise moment there were scenes of considerable activity around and aboard the Seawitch. The Panamanian-registered tanker Torbetto was just finishing off-loading the contents of the SeawitcWs massive floating conical oil tank. As they were doing so, two helicopters appeared over the northeastern horizon. Both were very large Sikorsky machines which had been bought by the thrifty Lord Worth for the traditional song, not because they were obsolete but because they were two of the scores that had become redundant since the end of the Vietnam War, and the armed forces had been only too anxious to get rid of them: civilian demand for ex-gunships is not high.

The first of those to land on the helipad debarked twenty-two men, led by Lord Worth and Giuseppe Palermo. The other twenty, who from their appearance were not much given to caring for widows and orphans, all carried with them the impeccable credentials of oil experts of one type or another. That they were experts was beyond question; what was equally beyond question was that none of them would have recognized a barrel of oil if he had fallen into it. They were

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experts in diving, underwater demolition, the handling of high explosives, and the accurate firing of a variety of unpleasant weapons.

The second helicopter arrived immediately after the first had taken off. Except for the pilot and copilot, it carried no other human cargo. What it did carry was the immense and varied quantity of highly offensive weapons from the Florida arsenal, the loss of which had not yet been reported in the newspapers.

The oil-rig crew watched the arrival of gunmen and weapons with an oddly dispassionate curiosity. They were men to whom the unusual was familiar; the odd, the incongruous, the inexplicable, part and parcel of their daily lives. Oil-rig crews are a race apart, and Lord Worth's men formed a very special subdivision of that race.

Lord Worth called them all together, told of the threat to the Seawitch and the defensive measures he was undertaking, measures which were thoroughly approved of by the crew, who had as much regard for their own skins as had the rest of mankind. Lord Worth finished by saying that he knew he had no need to swear them to secrecy.

In this the noble Lord was perfectly correct. Though they were all experienced, hardly a man aboard had not at one time or another had a close and painful acquaintanceship with the law. There were ex-convicts among them. There were escaped convicts among them. There were those

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whom the law was very anxious to interview. And there were parolees who had broken their parole. There could be no safer hideouts for those men than the Seawitch and Lord Worth's privately owned motel where they put up during then* off-duty spells. No law officer in his sane mind was going to question the towering respectability and integrity of one of the most powerful oil barons in the world, and by inevitable implication this attitude of mind extended to those in his employ.

In other words, Lord Worth, through the invaluable intermediacy of Commander Larsen, picked his men with extreme care.

Accommodation for the newly arrived men and storage for the weaponry presented no problem. Like many jack-ups, drill ships and sub-mersibles, the Seawitch had two complete sets of accommodation and messes—one for Westerners, the other for Orientals: there were at that time no Orientals aboard.

Lord Worth, Commander Larsen and Palermo held their own private council of war in the luxuriously equipped sitting room which Lord Worth kept permanently reserved for himself. They agreed on everything. They agreed that Cronkite's campaign against them would be distinguished by a noticeable lack of subtlety: outright violence was the only course open to him. Once the oil was off-loaded ashore, there was nothing Cronkite could do about it. He would

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not attempt to attack and sink a loaded tanker, just as he would not attempt to destroy their huge floating storage tank. Either method would cause a massive oil slick, comparable to or probably exceeding the great oil slick caused by the Torrey Canyon disaster off the southwest coast of England some years previously. The ensuing international uproar would be bound to uncover something, and if Cronkite were implicated he would undoubtedly implicate the major oil companies—who wouldn't like that at all. And that there would be a massive investigation was inevitable: ecology and pollution were still the watchwords of the day.

Cronkite could attack the flexible oil pipe that connected the rig with the tank, but the three men agreed that this could be taken care of. After Conde and the Roamer arrived and its cargo had been hoisted aboard, the Roamer would maintain a constant day-and-night patrol between the rig and the tank. The Seawitch was well-equipped with sensory devices, apart from those which controlled the tensioning anchor cables. A radar scanner was in constant operation atop the derrick, and sonar devices were attached to each of the three giant legs some twenty feet under water. The radar could detect any hostile approach from air or sea, and the dual-purpose antiaircraft guns, aboard and installed, could take care of those. In the highly unlikely event of an underwater attack, sonar

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would locate the source, and a suitably placed depth charge from the Roamer would attend to that.

Lord Worth, of course, was unaware that at that very moment another craft was moving out at high speed to join Cronkite on the Tiburon. It was a standard and well-established design irreverently known as the "push-pull," in which water was ducted in through a tube forward under the hull and forced out under pressure at the rear. It had no propeller and had been designed primarily for work close inshore or in swamps, where there was always the danger of the propeller being fouled. The only difference between this vessel—the Starlight—and others was that it was equipped with a bank of storage batteries and could be electrically powered. Sonar could detect and accurately pinpoint a ship's engines and propeller vibrations; it was virtually helpless against an electric push-pull.

Lord Worth and the others considered the possibility of a direct attack on the Seawitch. Because of her high degree of compartmentaliza-tion and her great positive buoyancy, nothing short of an atom bomb was capable of disposing of something as large as a football field. Certainly no conventional weapon could. The attack, when it came, would be localized. The drilling derrick was an obvious target, but how Cronkite could approach it unseen could not be imagined. But Lord Worth was certain of one

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thing: when the attack came it would be leveled against the Seawitch,

The next half hour was to prove, twice, just how wrong Lord Worth could be.

The first intimations of disaster came as Lord Worth was watching the fully laden Torbello just disappearing over the northern horizon; the Crusader, he knew, was due alongside the tank late that afternoon. Larsen, his face one huge scowl of fury, silently handed Lord Worth a signal just received in the radio office. Lord Worth read it, and his subsequent language would have disbarred him forever from a seat in the House of Lords. The message told, in cruelly unsparing fashion, of the spectacular end of the Crusader hi Galveston. -"'

Both men hurried to the radio room. Larsen contacted the Jupiter, their third tanker then off-loading at an obscure Louisiana port, told its captain the unhappy fate of the Crusader and warned him to have every man on board on constant lookout until they had cleared harbor. Lord Worth personally called the chief of police in Galveston, identified himself and demanded more details of the sinking of the Crusader. These he duly received, and none of them made him any happier. On inspiration, he asked if there had been a man called John Cronkite or a vessel belonging to a man of that name in the vicinity at the time. He was told to hang on while a check was made with Customs. Two minutes

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later he was told yes, there had been a John Cronkite aboard a vessel called the Tiburon, which had been moored directly aft of the Crusader. It was not known whether Cronkite was the owner or not. The Tiburon had sailed half an hour before the Crusader blew up.

Lord Worth peremptorily demanded that the Tiburon be apprehended and returned to port and that Cronkite be arrested. The police chief pointed out that international law prohibited the arrest of vessels on the high seas except in time of war and, as for Cronkite, there wasn't a shred of evidence to connect him with the sinking of the Crusader. Lord Worth then asked if he would trace the owner of the Tiburon. This the police chief promised to do, but warned that there might be a considerable delay. There were many registers to be consulted.

At that moment the Cuban submarine steaming on the surface at full speed was in the vicinity of Key West and heading directly for the Sea-witch. At almost the same time a missile-armed Russian destroyer slipped its moorings in Havana and set off in apparent pursuit of the Cuban submarine. And very shortly after that, a destroyer departed its home base in Venezuela.

The   Roamer,   Lord   Worth's   survey   vessel

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under the command of Conde, was now halfway to its destination.

The Starlight, under the command of Easton, was just moving away from the Tiburon, which was lying stopped in the water. Men on slings had already painted out the ship's name, and with the aid of cardboard stencils were painting in a new name—Georgia. Cronkite had no wish that any vessel with whom they might make contact could radio for confirmation of the existence of a cutter called Tiburon. From aft there came the unmistakable racket of a helicopter engine starting up, then the machine took off, circled and headed southeast, not on its usual pattern-bombing circuit but to locate and radio back to the Tiburon the location and course of the Torbello, if and when it found it. Within minutes the Tiburon was on its way again, heading in approximately the same direction as the helicopter.

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Chapter 4

Worth, enjoying a very early morning cup of tea, was in his living room with Larsen and Palermo when the radio operator knocked and entered, a message sheet in his hand. He handed it to Lord Worth and said: "For you, sir. But it's hi some sort of code. Do you have a code book?"

"No need." Lord Worth smiled with some self-satisfaction, his first smile of any kind for quite some tune. "I invented this code myself." He tapped his head. "Here's my code book."

The operator left. The other two watched in mild anticipation as Lord Worth began to de-

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code. The anticipation turned into apprehension as the smile disappeared from Lord Worth's face, and the apprehension gave way hi turn to deep concern as reddish-purple spots the size of pennies touched either cheekbone. He laid down the message sheet, took a deep breath, then proceeded to give a repeat performance—though this time more deeply felt, more impassioned— of the unparliamentary language he had used at the news of the loss of the Crusader. After some time he desisted, less because he had nothing fresh to say than from sheer loss of breath.

Larsen had more wit than to ask Lord Worth ft something were the matter. Instead he said in a quiet voice: "Suppose you tell us, Lord Worth?"

Lord Worth, with no little effort, composed himself and said: "It seems that Cor—" He broke off and corrected himself: it was one of his many axioms that the right hand shouldn't know what the left hand doeth. "I was informed—all too reliably, as it now appears— that a couple of countries hostile to us might well be prepared to use naval force against us. One, it appears, is already prepared to do so. A destroyer has just cleared its Venezuelan home port and is heading in what is approximately our direction."

"They wouldn't dare,'* Palermo said.

"When people are power- and money-mad they'll stop at nothing." It apparently never oc-

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curred to Lord Worth that his description of people applied, in excelsis, to himself.

"Who's the other power?" said Larsen.

"The Soviet Union."

"Is it now?" Larsen seemed quite unmoved. "I don't know if I like the sound of that."