Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (71 page)

But the great engine was still pounding along at 70% of power, and the
shaft still turned in the disintegrating bearing, smearing heat-softened
metal, buckling and distorting under unbearable strains.

The Chief Engineer was the first to reach the central console in the
engine control room, and without orders from the bridge he began
emergency shut-down of all systems.

It was another hour before the team under the direction of the First
Officer had the fire in the shaft tunnel under control. They used
carbon dioxide gas to smother the burning paint and oil, for cold water
on the heated metal would have aggravated the damage done by heat
distortion and buckling.

The metal of the main bearing casting was still so hot when the Chief
Engineer began opening it up, that it scorched the thick leather and
asbestos gloves worn by his team.

The bearing shells had disintegrated, and the shaft itself was brutally
scored and pitted. If there was distortion, the Chief knew it would not
be detected by eye. However, even a buckling of one ten thousandth of
an inch would be critical.

He cursed softly as he worked, nuking the obscenities sound like a
lullaby; he cursed the manufacturers of the lubricating pump, the men
who had installed and tested it, the damaged gland and the lack of a
back-up system, but mostly he cursed the stubbornness and intractability
of the Chairman of Christy Marine whose ill-advised judgement had turned
this functionally beautiful machinery into blackened smoking twisted
metal.

It was mid-morning by the time the Chief had the spare bearing shells
brought up from stores and unpacked from their wood shavings in the
wooden cases; but it was only when they came to fit them that they
realized that the cases had been incorrectly stencilled. The
half-shells that they contained were obsolete non-metric types, and they
were five millimetres undersized for Golden Dawn's shaft that tiny
variation in size made them utterly useless.

It was only then that Duncan Alexander's steely urbane control began to
crack; he raged about the bridge for twenty minutes making no effort to
think his way out of the predicament, but abusing Randle and his
engineer in wild and extravagant terms. His rage had a paralysing
e
ffect on all Golden Dawn's officers and they stood white-faced and
silently guilty.

Peter Berg had sensed the excitement and slipped up unobtrusively to
watch. He was fascinated by his stepfather's rage. He had never seen a
display like it before, and at one stage he hoped that Duncan
Alexander's eyeballs might actually burst like over-ripe grapes; he held
his breath in anticipation, and felt cheated when it did not happen.

At last, Duncan stopped and ran both hands through his thick waving
hair; two spikes of hair stood up like devil's horns. He was still
panting but he had recovered partial control.

‘
Now sir, what do you propose?
’
he demanded of Randle, and in the silence
Peter Berg piped up.

‘
You could have new shells sent from Bermuda - it's only three hundred
miles away. We checked it this morning.
’

‘
How did you get in here?
’
Duncan swung round.
‘
Get back to your mother
.’
Peter scampered, appalled
at his own indiscretion, and only when he left the bridge did the Chief
speak.

We could have spares flown out from London to Bermuda There must be a
boat–‘
Randle cut in swiftly.

‘
Or an aircraft to drop it to us
–‘

‘
Or a helicopter
–‘

‘
Get Christy Main on the
telex
,’
snapped Duncan Alexander.

I
t was good to have a deck under his feet again, Nicholas exulted.
He felt himself coming fully alive again.

‘
I'm a sea-creature
,’
he grinned to himself.
‘
And I keep forgetting it.
’

He
looked back to the low silhouette of the Bermuda islands, the receding
arms of Hamilton Harbour and the flecking of the multi-coloured
buildings amongst the cedar trees, and then returned his attention to
the spread charts on the navigation table before him.

Warlock was still at cautionary speed
. Even though the
channel was
wide and clearly buoyed, yet the coral reef on each hand was sharp and
hungry, and David Allen's full attention was on the business of conning
Warlock out into the open sea. But as they passed the 100 fathom line,
he gave the order to his deck officer,

‘
Full away at 0900, hours, pilot,
’
and hurried across to join Nicholas.

‘
I didn't have much of a chance to welcome you on board, sir.
’

‘
Thank you,
David. It's good to be back.
’
Nicholas looked up and smiled at him.
‘
Will you bring her round on to 240° magnetic and increase to 80% power?
’

Quickly David repeated his order to the helm and then shifted from one
foot to the other, beginning to flush under the salt-water tan.

‘
Mr. Berg, my officers are driving me mad. They've been plaguing me
since we left Cape Town, - are we running on a job - or is this a
pleasure cruise?
’

Nicholas laughed aloud then. He felt the excitement
of the hunt, a good hot scent in the nostrils, and the prospect of a fat
prize. Now he had Warlock under him, his concern for Peter's safety had
abated. Whatever happened now, he could get there very fast. No, he
felt good, very good.

‘
We're hunting, David
,’
he told him.
‘
Nothing certain yet,
’
-he paused, and
then relented,
‘
Get Beauty Baker up to my cabin, tell Angel to send up a
big pot of coffee and a mess of sandwiches - I missed breakfast - and
while we eating, I'll fill both of you in.
’

Beauty Baker accepted one of
Nicholas cheroots.

‘
Still smoking cheap
,’
he observed, and sniffed at the four-dollar cheroot
sourly, but there was a twinkle of pleasure behind the smeared lenses of
his spectacles. Then, unable to contain himself, he actually grinned.

‘
Skipper tells me we are hunting, is that right?
’

‘
This is the picture
–‘
Nicholas began to spell it out to them in detail, and while he talked,
he thought with comfortable self-indulgence,
‘
I must be getting old and
soft I didn't always talk so much.
’

Both men listened in silence, and
only when he finished did the two of them begin bombarding him with the
perceptive penetrating questions he had expected.

‘
Sounds like a generator armature
,’
Beauty Baker guessed, as he puzzled
the contents of the wooden case that had been flown out to Golden Dawn.
‘
I cannot believe that Golden Dawn doesn't carry a full set of mechanical
spares.
’

While Baker was fully preoccupied with the mechanics of the
situation, David Allen concentrated on the problems of seamanship.
‘
What
was the range of the helicopter? Has it returned to base yet? With her
draught, she must be heading for the Florida Straits. Our best bet
would be to shape a course for Matanilla Reef at the mouth of the
Straits.
’

There was a peremptory knock on the door of the guest cabin,
and the Trog stuck his grey wrinkled tortoise head through. He glanced
at Nicholas, but did not greet him.

‘
Captain, Miami is broadcasting a new hurricane alert.
"Lorna" has kicked northwards, they're predicting a track of north
north-west and a speed over the ground of twenty knots.
’

He closed the
door and they stared at each other in silence for a moment.

Nicholas spoke at last.

‘
It is never one single mistake that causes disaster
,’
he said.
‘
It is
always a series of contributory errors, most of them of small
consequence in themselves - but when taken with a little bad luck
–‘
he
was silent a moment and then, softly,
‘
Hurricane Lorna could just be that
bit of bad luck.
’
He stood up and took one turn around the small guest
cabin, feeling caged and wishing for the space of the Master's suite
which was now David Allen's. He turned back
to
Beauty Baker and David Allen
,
and suddenly he realized that they were hoping for disaster. They
were like two old sea wolves with the scent of the prey in their
nostrils. He felt his anger rising coldly against them, they were
wishing disaster on his son.

‘J
ust one thing I didn't tell you
,’
he said.
‘
My son is on Golden Dawn.
’

The immense revolving storm that was code-named Lorna was nearing full
development. Her crest was reared high above the freezing levels so she
wore a splendid mane of frosted white ice particles that streamed out
three hundred miles ahead of her on the jet stream of the upper
troposphere.

From one side to the other, she now measured one hundred and fifty miles
across, and the power unleashed within her was of unmeasurable savagery.

The winds that blew around her centre tore the surface off the sea and
bore it aloft at speeds in excess of one hundred and fifty miles an
hour, generating precipitation that was as far beyond rain as death is
beyond life. Water filled the dense cloud-banks so that there was no
clear line between sea and air.

It seemed now that madness fed upon madness, and like a blinded and
berserk monster, she blundered across the confined waters of the
Caribbean, ripping the trees and buildings, even the very earth from the
tiny islands which stood in her path.

But there were still forces controlling what seemed uncontrollable,
dictating what seemed to be random, for, as she spun upon a spinning
globe, the storm showed the primary trait of gyroscopic inertia, a
rigidity in space that was constant as long as no outside force was
applied, Obeying this natural law, the entire system moved steadily
eastwards at constant speed and altitude above the surface of the earth,
until her northern edge touched the land-mass of the long ridge of land
that forms the greater Antilles.

Immediately another gyroscopic law came into force, the law of
precession. When a deflecting force is applied to the rim of a spinning
gyro, the gyro moves not away from, but directly towards that force.

Hurricane Lorna felt the land, and, like a maddened bull at the flirt of
the matador's cape, she turned and charged towards it, crossing the
narrow high strips of Haiti in an orgy of destruction and terror until
she burst out of the narrow channel of the Windward Passage into the
open beyond.

Yet still she kept on spinning and moving. Now, barely three hundred
miles ahead of her, across those shallow reefs and banks prophetically
named Hurricane Flats after the thousands of other such storms that had
followed the same route during the memory of man, lay the deeper waters
of the Florida Straits and the
mainl
and of the continental United
States of America.