Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (82 page)

‘
I will
p
ut my bows against the starboard
quarterdeck
rail, directly under the forward wing of the bridge. Be
ready to jump aboard.
’

‘
Jules, you are out of your head!
’

‘
I have been
that way for fifty years
,’
Jules agreed amiably.
‘
Be ready.
’

'Jules, drop
your tow first,
’
Nicholas pleaded. It would be almost impossible to
manoeuvre the Sea Witch with that monstrous dead weight hanging on her
tail.
‘
Drop tow. We can pick up again later.
’

‘
You teach your
grandfather to break eggs,
’
Jules blithely mangled the old saying,
giving it a sinister twist.

‘
Listen Jules, the No. 4 tank has ruptured. I want you to shut down for
fire. Do you understand?
Full fire shut down.
Once I am aboard, we will put a rocket into her and burn off cargo.
’

‘
I
hear you, Nicholas, but I wish I had not.
’

Nicholas left the control cubicle, jumped the gaping, chewing gap in the
decking and scrambled up the steel ladder on to the central catwalk.

Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the endlessly slippery grey
wall of racing cloud and wind; its menace was overpowering, so that for
a moment he faltered before forcing himself into running back along the
catwalk towards the tanker's stern tower half a mile ahead.

The single remaining seaman was on the catwalk a hundred yards ahead of
him, pounding determinedly back towards the pick-up point. He also had
heard Jules Levoisin's last transmission.

A quarter of a mile across the roiling, leaping waters, Jules Levoisin
was bringing Sea Witch around. At another time Nicholas would have been
impressed by the consummate skill with which the little Frenchman was
handling his ship and its burdensome tow, but now there was time and
energy for one thing only.

The air stank. The heavy fumes of crude oil burned
Nicholas’
pumping lungs, and
constricted his throat. He coughed and gasped as he ran, the
taste and reek of it coated his tongue and seared his nostrils.

Below the catwalk, the bloated pod-tank was punctured in a hundred
places by the steel lances of the disintegrating hull, pinched and torn
by moving steel girders, and the dark red oil spurted and dribbled and
oozed from it like the blood from the carcass of a mortally wounded
poisonous dragon.

Nicholas reached the stern tower, barged in through the storm doors to
the lowest deck and reached the pump control room.

Duncan Alexander turned to him, as he entered, his face swollen and
bruised where Nicholas had beaten him.

‘
We are abandoning now
,’
said Nicholas. Sea Witch is taking us off.
’

‘
I
hated you from that very first day
,’
Duncan was very calm, very
controlled, his voice even, deep and cultured.
Did you know that?’

‘
There's no time for that now.
’
Nicholas grabbed his
arm, and Duncan followed him readily into the passageway.

‘
That's what the game is all about, isn't it, Nicholas, power and wealth
and women - that's the game we played.
’

Nicholas was barely listening.
They were out on to the quarter-deck, standing at its starboard rail,
below the bridge, the pick-up point that Jules had stipulated. Sea
Witch was turning in, only five hundred yards out, and Nicholas had time
now to watch Jules handle his ship.

He was running out the heavy tow-cable on free spool, deliberately
letting a long bight of it form between the tug and its enormous
whale
-
like burden, and he was using the slack in the cable to cut in
towards Golden Dawn's battered, sagging hulk. He would be alongside for
the pickup in less than a minute.

‘
That was the game we played, you and I,
’
Duncan was still talking calmly.
‘
Power and wealth and women
-‘

Below them Golden Dawn poured her substance
into the sea in a slick, stinking flood. The waves, battering against
her side, churned the oil to a thick filthy emulsion, and it was
spreading away across the surface, bleeding its deadly poison into the
Gulf Stream to broadcast it to the entire ocean.

‘
I won
,’
Duncan went on reasonably.
‘
I won it all, every time
–‘
He was
groping in his pockets, but Nicholas hardly heard him, was not watching
him.
‘
- until now.
’

Duncan took one of the self-igniting signal flares from his pocket and
held it against his chest with both hands, slipping his index finger
through the metal ring of the igniter tab.

‘
And yet I win this one also, Nicholas
,’
he said.
‘
Game, set and match.
’
And he pulled the tab on the flare with a sharp jerk, and stepped back,
holding it aloft.

It spluttered once and then burst into brilliant sparkling red flame,
white phosphorescent smoke billowing from it.

Now at last Nicholas turned to face him, and for a moment he was too
appalled to move. Then he lunged for Duncan's raised hand that held the
burning flare, but Duncan was too fast for him to reach it.

He whirled and threw the flame in a high spluttering arc, out over the
leaking, stinking tank-deck.

It struck the steel tank and bounced once, and then rolled down the
canted oil-coated plating.

Nicholas stood paralysed at the rail staring down at it.
He expected a violent explosion, but nothing happened, the flare rolled
innocently across the deck, burning with its pretty red twinkling light.

‘
It's not burning,
’
Duncan cried.
‘
Why doesn't it burn?
’

Of course, the gas was only explosive in a confined space, and it needed
spark, Out here in the open air the oil had a very high flashpoint, it
must be heated to release its volatiles.

The flare caught in the scuppers and fizzled in a black pool of crude,
and only then the crude caught. It caught with a red, slow, sulky flame
that spread quickly but not explosively over the entire deck, and
instantly, thick billows of dark smoke rose in a dense choking cloud.

Below where Nicholas stood, the Sea Witch thrust her bows in and touched
them against the tanker's side. The seaman beside Nicholas jumped and
landed neatly on the tug's bows, then raced back along Sea Witch's deck.

‘
Nicholas,
’
Jules voice thundered over the loudhailer.
‘J
ump, Nicholas.

Nicholas spun back to the rail and poised himself to
jump.

Duncan caught him from behind, whipping one arm around his throat, and
pulling him backwards away from the rail.

‘
No
,’
Duncan shouted.
‘
You're sta
y
ing my friend. You are not going
anywhere. You are staying here with me.
’

A greasy wave of black choking
smoke engulfed them, and Jules
’
magnified voice roared in Nicholas
’
ears
.

‘
Nic
holas, I cannot hold her here. J
ump, quickly, jump
!’

Duncan had him
off-balance, dragging him backwards, away from the ship's side, and
suddenly Nicholas knew what he must do.

Instead of resisting Duncan's arm, he hurled himself backwards and they
crashed together into the superstructure - but Duncan bore the combined
weight of both their bodies.

His armlock around the throat relaxed slightly and Nicholas drove his
elbow into Duncan's side below the r
ibs, then wrenched his body for
ward
from the waist, reached between his own braced legs and caught Duncan's
ankles.
He straightened up again, dragging Duncan off his feet and the same
instant dropped backwards with his full weight on to the deck.

Duncan gasped and his arm fell away, as Nicholas bounced to his feet
again, choking in the greasy billows of smoke, and he reached the ship's
side.

Below him, the gap between Sea Witch's bows and the tanker's side was
rapidly widening and the thrust of the sea and the drag of the tug
pulled them apart.

Nicholas vaulted on to the rail, poised for an instant and then jumped.
He struck the deck and his teeth cracked together with the impact; his
injured leg gave under him and he rolled once, then he was up on his
hands and knees.

He looked up at Golden Dawn. She was completely enveloped now in the
boiling column of black smoke. As the flames heated the leaking crude,
so it burned more readily. The bank of smoke was shot through now with
the satanic crimson of high, hot flame.

As Sea Witch sheered desperately away, the first rush of the storm hit
them, and for a moment it smeared the smoke away, exposing the tanker's
high quarter-deck.

Duncan Alexander stood at the rail above the roaring holocaust of the
tank-deck. He stood with his arms extended, and he was burning, his
clothing burned fiercely and his hair was a bright torch of flame. He
stood like a ritual cross, outlined in fire, and then slowly he seemed
to shrivel and he
toppled forward over the rail into the bubbling,
spurting, burning cargo of the monstrous ship that he had built - and
the black smoke closed over him like a funeral cloak.

As the crude oil escaping from the pierced pod tank fed the flames, so
the heat built up swiftly, still sufficient to consume only the volatile
aromatic spirits which constituted less than half the bulk of the cargo.

The heavy carbon elements, not yet hot enough to burn, boiled off in
that solid black column of smoke, and as the returning winds of the
hurricane raced over the Golden Dawn
once more, so that filthy pall was
mixed with air and lifted into the cloud bank of the storm, rising first
a thousand, then ten, then twenty thousand feet above the surface of the
ocean.

And still Golden Dawn burned, and the temperatures of the gas and oil
mixture trapped in her hull rocketed steeply. Steel glowed red, then
brilliant white, ran like molten wax, and then like water - and suddenly
the flashpoint of heavy carbon smoke in a mixture of air and water
vapour was reached in the womb of this mighty furnace.

Golden Daw
n
and her entire cargo turned into a fireball.

The steel and glass and metal of her hull disappeared in an
instantaneous explosive combustion that released temperatures like those
upon the surface of the sun. Her cargo, a quarter of a million tons of
it, burned in an instant, releasing a white blooming rose of pure heat
so fierce that it shot up into the upper stratosphere and consumed the
billowing pall of its own hydrocarbon gas and smoke.

The very air burst into flame, the surface of the sea flamed in that
white fireball of heat and even the clouds of smoke burned as the oxygen
and hydrocarbon they contained exploded.

Once an entire city had been subjected to this phenomena of fireball,
when stone and earth and air had exploded, and five thousand German
citizens of the city of Cologne had been vaporized, and that vapour
burned in the heat of its own release.