Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  Allen's voice came back immediately, acknowledging and confirming his readiness, then he went on, ‘The glass just went through the floor, Skipper, she's 996 and going down. Wind's force six rising seven and backing. It looks like we are fair in the dangerous quadrant of whatever is coming.’

  ‘Thank you, David!’ Nick replied. ‘You warm my heart.’

  He stepped forward, and they helped him into the canvas bosun's chair. Nick checked the tackle and rigging, that once-more-for-luck check, and then he nodded.

  The interior of the engine room was no longer dark, for Baker had rigged floodlights high above in the ventilation shaft, but the water was black with engine oil, and as Nick was lowered slowly down, with legs dangling from the bosun's chair, it surged furiously back and across like some panic-stricken monster trying to break out of its steel cage. That wind-driven swell was crashing into Golden Adventurer's side and boiling in through the opening, setting up its own wave action, forming its own currents and eddies which broke and leaped angrily against the steel bulkheads.

  ‘Slower,’ Nick spoke into the microphone. ‘Stop!’ His downward progress was halted ten feet above the starboard main engine block, but the confined surge of water broke over the engine as though it were a coral reef, covering it entirely at one instant, and then sucking back and exposing it again at the next.

  The rush of water could throw a man against that machinery with force enough to break every bone in his body, and Nick hung above it and studied the purchases for his blocks.

  ‘Send down the main block,’ he ordered, and the huge steel block came down out of the shadows and dangled in the floodlights.

  ‘Stop.’ Nick began directing the block into position. ‘Down two feet. Stop!’

  Now waist-deep in the oily, churning water, he struggled to drive the shackle pin and secure the block to one of the main frames of the hull. Every few minutes a stronger surge would hurl the water over his head, forcing him to cling helplessly, until it relinquished its grip, and his visor cleared sufficiently to allow him to continue his task.

  He had to pull out and rest after forty minutes of it.He sat as close as he could to the heat-exchangers of the running diesel engine of the alternator, taking warmth from them and drinking Angel's strong sweet Thermos coffee. He felt like a fighter between rounds, his body aching, every muscle strained and chilled by the efforts of fighting that filthy churned emulsion of sea water and oil, his flanks and ribs bruised from harsh contact with the submerged machinery. But after twenty minutes, he stood up again.

  ‘Let's go,’ he said and resettled the helmet. The hiatus had given him a chance to replan the operation, thinking his way around the problems he had found down there; now the work seemed to fall more readily into place, though he had lost all sense of time alone in the infernal resounding cavern of steel and he was not sure of the hour, or the phase of the day, when at last he was ready to carry the messenger out through the gap.

  ‘Send it down,’ he ordered into his headset, and the reel of light line came down, swinging and circling under the glaring floodlights to the ship's motion and throwing grotesque shadows into the far corners of the engine room.

  The line was of finely plaited Dacron, with enormous strength and elasticity in relation to its thinness and tightness. One end was secured on the deck high above, and Nick threaded it into the sheave blocks carefully, so that it was free to run.

  Then he clamped the reel of line on to his belt, riding it on his hip where it could be protected from snagging when he made the passage of the gap.

  He realized then how close to final exhaustion he was, and he considered breaking off the work to rest again, but the heightened action of the sea into the hull warned him against further delay. An hour from now the task might be impossible, he had to go, and he reached for the reserve of strength and purpose deep inside himself, surprised to find that it was still there - for the icy chill of the water seemed to have penetrated his suit and entered his soul, dulling every sense and turning his very bones brittle and heavy.

  It must be day outside, he realised, for light came through the gash of steel, pale light further obscured by the filthy muck of mixed oil and water contained in the hull.

  He clung to one of the engine-room stringers, his head seven feet from the opening, breathing in the slow, even rhythm of the experienced scuba diver, feeling the ebb and flow through the hull, and trying to find some pattern in the action of the water. But it seemed entirely random, a hissing, bubbling ingestion followed by three or four irregular and weak inflows, then three vicious exhalations of such power that they would have windmilled a swimming man end over into those daggers of splayed steel.

  He had to choose and ride a middling-sized swell, strong enough to take him through smoothly, without the dangerous power and turbulence of those viciously large swells.

  ‘I'm ready to go now, David,’ he said into his helmet. ‘Confirm that the work boat is standing by for the pick-up outside the hull.’

  ‘We are all ready.’ David Allen's voice was tense and sharp.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Nick, this was his wave now. There was no point in waiting longer.

  He checked the reel on his belt, ensuring that the line was free to run, and watched the gash suck in clean green water, filled with tiny bright bubbles, little diamond chips that flew past his head to warn him of the lethal speed and power of that flood.

  The inflow slowed and stopped as the hull filled to capacity, building up great pressures of air and water, and then the flow reversed abruptly as the swell on the far side subsided, and trapped water began to rush out again.

  Nick released his grip on the stringer and instantly the water caught him. There was no question of being able to swim in that mill-race, all he could hope for was to keep his arms at his sides and his legs straight together to give himself a smoother profile, and to steer with his fins.

  The accelerating speed appalled him as he was flung head first at that murderous steel mouth, he could feel the nylon line streaming out against his leg, the reel on his belt racing as though a giant marlin had struck and hooked upon the other end.

  The rush of his progress seemed to leave his guts behind him as though he rode a fairground roller-coaster, and then a flick of the current turned him, he felt himself beginning to roll - and he fought wildly for control just as he hit.

  He hit with a numbing shock, so his vision starred in flashing colour and light. The shock was in his shoulders and left arm, and he thought it might have been severed by that razor steel.

  Then he was swirling, end over end, completely disorientated so he did not know which direction was up. He did not know if he was still inside Golden Adventurer's hull, and the nylon line was wrapping itself around his throat and chest, around the precious air tubes and cutting off his air supply like a stillborn infant strangled by its own umbilical cord.

  Again he hit something, this time with the back of his head, and only the cushioning of his helmet saved his skull from cracking. He flung out his arms and found the rough irregular shape of ice above him.

  Terror wrapped him again, and he screamed soundlessly into his mask, but suddenly he broke out into light and air, into the loose scum of slush and rotten ice mixed with bigger, harder chunks, one of which had hit him.

  Above him towered the endless steel cliff of the liner's side and beyond that, the low bruised wind-sky, and as he struggled to disentangle himself from the coils of nylon, he realized two things. The first was that both his arms were still attached to his body, and still functioning, and the second was that Warlock's work boat was only twenty feet away and butting itself busily through the brash of rotten broken ice towards him.

  The collision mat looked like a five-ton Airedale terrier curled up to sleep in the bows of the work boat, just as shaggy and shapeless, and of the same wiry, furry brown colour.

  Nick had shed his helmet and pulled an Arctic cloak and hood over his bare head and suited torso. He was balanced i
n the stern of the work boat as she plunged and rolled and porpoised in the big swells; chunks of ice crashed against her hull, knocking loose chips off her paintwork, but she was steel-hulled, wide and sea-kindly. The helmsman knew his job, working her with calm efficiency to Nick's hand-signals, bringing her in close through the brash ice, under the tall sheer of Golden Adventurer's stern.

  The thin white nylon line was the only physical contact with the men on the liner's towering stack of decks, the messenger which would carry heavier tackle. However it was vulnerable to any jagged piece of pancake ice, or the fangs of that voracious underwater steel jaw.

  Nick paid out the line through his own numbed hands, feeling for the slightest check or jerk which could mean a snag and a break-off.

  With hand-signals, he kept the work boat positioned so that the line ran cleanly into the pierced hull, around the sheave blocks he had placed with such heart-breaking labour in the engine room, from there up the tall ventilation, out of the square opening of the stack and around the winch, beside which Beauty Baker was supervising the recovery of the messenger.

  The gusts tore at Nick's head so that he had to crouch to shield the small two-way radio on his chest, and Baker's voice was tinny and thin in the buffeting boom of wind.

  ‘Line running free.’

  ‘Right, we are running the wire now,’ Nick told him.

  The second line was as thick as a man's index finger, and it was of the finest Scandinavian steel cable. Nick checked the connection between nylon and steel cable himself, the nylon messenger was strong enough to carry the weight of steel, but the connection was the weakest point.

  He nodded to the crew, and they let it go over the side; the white nylon disappeared into the cold green water and now the black steel cable ran out slowly from the revolving drum.

  Nick felt the check as the connection hit the sheave block in the engine room. He felt his heart jump. If it caught now, they would lose it all; no man could penetrate that hull again, the sea was now too vicious. They would lose the tackle, and they would lose Golden Adventurer, she would break up in the seas that were coming.

  ‘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 suddenly 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.’

  Again the whole laborious, touchy, nerve-scouring process 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.

  It 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 in
to 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.