Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (20 page)

‘
Please God, let it run,
’
Nick whispered in the boom and burst of sea
wind. The drum halted, made a half turn and jammed. somewhere down
there
the cable had snagged and Nick signalled to the helmsman to take
the work boat in closer, to change the angle of the line into the hull.

He could almost feel the strain along his nerves as the winch took up
the pull, and he could imagine the fibres of the nylon messenger
stretching and creaking.

‘
Let it run! Let it run!
’
prayed Nick, and then
s
uddenly he saw the drum
begin to revolve again, the cable feeding out smoothly, and streaming
down into the sea.

Nick felt light-hearted, almost dizzy with relief, as he heard Baker's
voice over the VHF, strident with triumph.

‘
Wire secured. Stand by
,’
Nick told him.
‘
We are connecting the two inch
wire now.
’

Ag
a
in the whole laborious, touchy, nerve-scouring
p
rocess as
the massive two-inch steel cable was drawn out by its thinner, weaker
forerunner - and it was a further forty vital minutes, with the wind and
sea rising every moment, before Baker shouted,
‘
Main cable secured, we
are ready to haul!
’

‘
Negative
’
Nick told him urgently.
‘
Take the strain
and hold.
’
If the collision mat in the bows hooked and held on the work
boat's gunwale, Baker would pull the bows under and swamp her.

Nick signalled to his crew and the five of them shambled up into the
bows, bulky and clumsy in their electric-yellow oilskins and work boots.
With hand-signals, Nick positioned them around the shaggy head-high pile
of the collision mat before he signalled to the helmsman to throw the
gear in reverse and pull back from Golden Adventurer's side.

The mass of unravelled oakum quivered and shook as the two-inch cable
came up taut and they struggled to heave the whole untidy mass
overboard.

There was nearly five tons of it and the weight would have been
impossible to handle were it not for the reverse pull of the work boat
against the cable. Slowly, they heaved the mat forward and outward, and
the work boat took on a dangerous list under the transfer of weight. She
was down at the bows and canting at an angle of twenty degrees, the
diesel motor screaming angrily and her single propeller threshing
frantically, trying to pull her out from under her cumbersome burden.

The mat slid forward another foot, and snagged on the gunwale, sea water
slopped inboard, ankle-deep around their rubber boots as they strained
and heaved at the reluctant mass of coarse fibre.

Some instinct of danger made Nick look up and out to sea. Warlock was
lying a quarter of a mile farther out in the bay, at the edge of the
ice, and beyond her, Nick saw the rearing shape of a big wave alter the
fine of the horizon.
It was merely a forerunner of the truly big waves that the storm was
running before her, like hounds before the hunter, but it was big enough
to make Warlock throw up her stern sharply, and even then the sea
creamed over the tug's bows and streamed from her scuppers.

I
t would hit the exposed and hampered work boat in twenty-five seconds,
it would hit her broadside while her bows were held down and anchored by
mat and cable.
When she swamped, the five men who made up her crew would die within
minutes, pulled down by their bulky clothing, frozen by the icy green
water.

‘
Beauty
,’
Nick's voice was a scream in the microphone,
‘
heave all - pull,
damn you, pull.
’
Almost instantly the cable began to run, drawn in by
the powerful winch on Golden Adventurer's deck; the strain pulled the
work boat down sharply and water cascaded over her gunwale.

Nick seized one of the oaken oars and thrust it under the mat at the
point where it was snagged, and using it as a lever he threw all his
weight upon it.

‘
Lend a hand
,’
he yelled at the man beside him, and he strained until he
felt his vision darkening and the fibres of
his back-muscles creaking
and popping.

The work boat was swamping, they were almost knee
-
deep now and the wave
raced down on them. It came with a great silent rush of irresistible
power, lifting the mass of broken ice and tossing it carelessly aside
without a check.

Suddenly, the snag cleared and the whole lumpy massive weight of oakum
slid overboard. The work boat bounded away, relieved of her intolerable
burden, and Nick windmilled frantically with both arms to get the
helmsman to bring her bows round to the wave.

They went up the wave with a gut-swooping rush that threw them down on
to the floorboards of the half-flooded work boat, and then crashed over
the crest.

Behind them the wave slogged into Golden Adventurer's stern, and shot up
it with an explosion of white and furious water that turned to white
driven spray in the wind.

The helmsman already had the work boat pushing heavily through the
pack-ice, back towards the waiting Warlock.

‘
Stop
,’
Nick signalled him.
‘
Back up.
’

Already he was struggling out of his hood and oilskins, as he staggered
back to the stern.

He shouted in the helmsman's face,
‘
I'm going down to check
,’
and he saw
the disbelieving, almost pleading, expression on the man's face.
He wanted to get out of there now, back to the safety of Warlock, but
relentlessly Nick resettled the diving helmet and connected his air
hose.

The collision mat was floating hard against Golden Adventurer's side,
buoyant with trapped air among the mass of wiry fibre.

Nick positioned himself beneath it twenty feet from the maelstrom
created by the gashed steel.

It took him only a few seconds to ensure that the cable was free, and he
blessed Beauty Baker silently for stopping the winch immediately it had
pulled the mat free of the work boat. Now he could direct the final
task.

‘
She's looking good,
’
he told Baker.
‘
But take her up slowly, fifty feet
a minute on the winch.
’

‘
Fifty feet, it is!
’
Baker confirmed.

And slowly the bobbing mat was drawn down below the surface.

‘
Good, keep it at that.
’

It was like pressing a field-dressing into an
open bleeding wound. The outside pressure of water drove it deep into
the gash, while from the inside the two-inch cable plugged it deeper
into place. The wound was staunched almost instantly and Nick finned
down, and swam carefully over it.

The deadly suck and blow of high pressure through the gap was killed
now, and he detected only the lightest movement of water around the
edges of the mat; but the oakum fibres would swell now they were
submerged and, within hours the plug would be watertight.

‘
It's done
,’
said Nick into his microphone.
‘
Hold a twenty-ton pull on the
cable - and you can start your pumps and suck the bitch clean.
’
It was a
measure of his stress and relief and fatigue that Nick called that
beautiful ship a bitch, and he regretted the word as it was spoken.

Nick craved sleep, every nerve, every muscle shrieked for surcease, and
in his bathroom mirror his eyes were inflamed, angry with salt and wind
and cold; the smears of exhaustion that underlined them were as lurid as
the fresh bruises and abrasions that covered his shoulders and thighs
and ribs.

His hands shook in a mild palsy with the need for rest and his legs
could hardly carry him as he forced himself back to Warlock's navigation
bridge.

‘
Congratulations, sir
,’
said David Allen, and his admiration was
transparent.

‘
How's the glass, David?
’
Nick asked, trying to keep the weariness from
showing.

‘
994 and dropping, sir.
’
Nick looked across at Golden Adventurer. Below
that dingy low sky, she stood like a pier, unmoved by the big swells
that marched on her in endless ranks, and she shrugged aside each burst
of spray, hard aground and heavy with the water in her womb.
However, that water was being flung from her, in solid white sheets.

Baker's big centrifugals were running at full power, and from both her
port and starboard quarters the water poured.

It looked as though the flood gates had been opened on a concrete dam,
so powerful was the rush of expelled water.

The oil and diesel mixed with that discharge formed a sullen, iridescent
slick around her, sullying the ice and the pebble beach on which she
lay. The wind caught the jets from the pump outlets and tore them away
in glistening plumes, like great ostrich feathers of spray.

‘
Chief
,’
Nick called the ship.
‘
What's your discharge rate?
’

‘
We are moving
nigh on five hundred thousand gallons an hour.

‘
Call me as soon as she
alters her trim!
’
he said, and then glanced up at the pointer of the
anemometer above the control panel. The wind force was riding eight
now, but he had to blink his stinging swollen eyes to read the scale.

‘
David
,’
he said, and he could hear the hoarseness in his voice, the flat
dead tone.
‘
It will be four hours before she will be light enough to
make an attempt to haul her off, but I want you to put the main
towing-cable on board her and make fast, so we will be ready when she
is.
’

‘
Sir.
’

‘
Use a rocket-line
,’
said Nick, and then stood dumbly, trying
to think of the other orders he must give, but his brain was blank.

‘
Are you all right, sir?
’
David asked with quick concern, and immediately
Nick felt the prick of annoyance. He had never wanted sympathy in his
life, and he found his voice again. But he stopped the sharp words that
came so quickly to his lips.

‘
You know what to do, David. I won't give you any other advice.
’
He
turned like a drunkard towards his quarters.
‘
Call me when you've done it, or if Baker reports alteration of trim - or
if anything else changes, anything, anything at all, you understand.
’
He
made it to the cabin before his knees buckled and he
dropped his terry robe as he toppled backwards on to his bunk.

At 6
0
^o
south latitude, there runs the only sea-lane that circumnavigates
the entire globe, unbroken by any land mass. This wide girdle of open
water runs south of Cape Horn and Australasia and the Cape of Good Hope,
and it has the fearsome reputation of breeding the wildest weather on
earth. It is the meeting-ground of two vast air masses, the cold
slumping Antarctic air, and the warmer, more buoyant airs of the
sub-tropics. These are flung together by the centrifugal forces
generated by the earth as it revolves on its own axis, and their
movement is further complicated by the enormous torque of the coriolis
force.
As they strike each other, the opposing air masses split into smaller
fragments that retain their individual characteristics. They begin to
revolve upon themselves
,
gigantic whirlpools of tortured air, and as they
advance, so they gain in strength and power and velocity.