Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Doctor?’ Nick asked.

  ‘I'm afraid so,’ she smiled, and then went on to talk about the university, explaining her research project, and the other work she had in mind. Nicholas listened silently, for like all highly competitive and successful men, he respected achievement and ambition.

  The chasm that he imagined existed between them shrank rapidly, so that it was an intrusion when the eight-to-twelve watch ended, and the relief brought other human presence to the bridge, shattering the fragile mood they had created around themselves, and denying them further excuse for remaining together.

  ‘Goodnight, Captain Berg,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight, Doctor Silver,’ he answered reluctantly. Until that night, he had not even known her name, and there was so much more he wanted to know now, but she was gone from the bridge; as he entered his own suite, Nick's earlier loneliness returned, but with even more poignancy.

  During the long day of getting Golden Adventurer under tow, the hours of trim and accommodation to the sea, until she was following meekly settling down to the long journey ahead, Nick thought of the girl at unlikely moments; but when he changed his usual routine and dined in the saloon rather than his own cabin, she was surrounded by a solidly attentive phalanx of young men, and, with a small shock of self-honesty, Nick realized that he was actually jealous of them. Twice during the meal, he had to suppress the sharp jibes that came to his lips, and would have plunged the unfortunate recipient into uncomprehending confusion.

  Nick ate no desert and took coffee alone in his day cabin. He might have relished Beauty Baker's company, but the Australian was aboard Golden Adventurer, working on her main engines. Then, despite the tensions and endeavours of the day, his bunk had no attractions for him. He glanced at the clock on the panelled bulkhead above his desk and saw that it was a few minutes after eight o'clock.

  On impulse he went through to the navigation bridge, and Tim Graham leapt guiltily to his feet. He had been sitting in the Master's chair, a liberty which deserved at the least a sharp reprimand, but Nick pretended not to notice and made a slow round of the bridge, checking every detail from the cable tensions of the tow and power settings of Warlock's engines, to the riding lights on both ships and the last log entry.

  ‘Mr. Graham,’ he said, and the young officer stiffened to attention like the victim before a firing squad, ‘I will stand this watch - you may go and get some dinner.’ The Third Officer was so thunderstruck that he needed a large gin before he could bring himself to tell the wardroom of his good fortune.

  Samantha did not look up from the board but moved a bishop flauntingly across the front of David Allen's queen, and when David pounced on it with a gurgle of glee, she unleashed her rook from the rear file and said, Mate in three, David.’

  ‘One more, Sam, give me my revenge,’ pleaded David, but she shook her head and slipped out of the wardroom.

  Nicholas became aware of the waft of her perfume. it was an inexpensive but exuberant fragrance -'Babe', that was it, the one advertised by Hemingway's granddaughter. It suited Samantha perfectly. He turned to her, and it was only then that he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had relieved his Third Officer with the express intention of luring the girl up to the bridge.

  ‘There are whales ahead,’ he told her, and smiled one of those rare, irresistible smiles that she had come to treasure. ‘I hoped you might come up.’

  ‘Where? Where are they?’ she asked with unfeigned excitement, and then they both saw the spout, a golden feather of spray in the low night sunlight two miles ahead.

  ‘Balaenoptera musculus!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I'll take your word for it, Doctor Silver, but to me it's still a blue whale.’ Nick was still smiling, and she looked abashed for a moment.

  ‘Sorry, I wasn't trying to dazzle you with science.’ Then she looked back at the humpy, uninviting cold sea as the whale blew again, a far and ethereal column of lonely spray.

  ‘One,’ she said, ‘only one.’ And the excitement in her voice cooled. ‘There are so few of them left now - that might be the last one we will ever see. So few that they cannot find each other in the vastness of the ocean to breed.’ Nick's smile was gone also, and again they talked of the sea, of their own involvement with it, their mutual concern at what man had done to it, and what he was still doing to it.

  ‘When the Marxist government of Mozambique took over from the Portuguese colonists, it allowed the Soviets to send in dredges - not trawlers, but dredges - and they dredged the weed beds of Delagoa Bay. They actually dredged the breeding grounds of the Mozambique prawn. They took out a thousand tons of prawn, and destroyed the grounds for ever - and they drove an entire species into extinction in six short months.’ Her outrage was in her voice as she told it.

  ‘Two months ago the Australians arrested a Japanese trawler in their territorial waters. She had in her freezers the meat of 120,000 giant clams that her crew had torn from the barrier reef with crow bars. The clam population of a single coral reef would not exceed 20,000. That means they had denuded six oceanic reefs in one expedition - and they fined the Captain a thousand pounds.’

  ‘It was the Japanese who perfected the "long line",’ Nick agreed, ‘the endless floating line, armed with specially designed hooks, and laid across the lanes of migration of the big pelagic surface-feeding fish, the tuna and the marlin. They wipe out the shoals as they advance - wipe them out to the last fish.’

  ‘You cannot reduce any animal population beyond a certain point.’ Samantha seemed much older as she turned her face up to Nick. ‘Look what they did to the whales.’

  Together they turned back to the windows, gazing out in hope for a glimpse of that gentle monster, doomed now to extinction, one last look at another creature that would disappear from the seas.

  ‘The Japanese and the Russians again,’ said Nick. ‘They would not sign the whaling treaty until there were not enough blues left in the seas to make their killing an economic proposition. Then they signed it. When there were two or three thousand blue whales left in all the oceans, that is when they signed.’

  ‘Now they will hunt the Fin and the Sei and the Minke to extinction.’ As they stood side by side staring into the bizarre sun-lit night, searching vainly for that spark of life in the watery wilderness, without thinking Nick lifted his arm; he would have placed it around her shoulders, the age-old protective attitude of man to his woman, but he caught himself at the last moment before he actually touched her. She had felt his movement and tensed for it, swaying slightly towards him in anticipation, but he stepped away, letting his arm fall and stooped over the radarscope. She only realized then how much she had wanted him to touch her, but for the rest of that evening he stayed within the physical limits which he seemed to have set for himself.

  The next evening she declined the wardroom's importunate invitations, and after dinner waited in her own cabin, the door an inch ajar so she heard Tim Graham leave the bridge, clattering down the companionway with exuberance, relieved once more of his watch. The moment he entered the wardroom, Samantha slipped from her cabin and ran lightly up to the bridge.

  She was with him only minutes after he had assumed the watch and Nick was amused by the strength of his pleasure. They grinned at each other like school children in a successful piece of mischief.

  Before the light went, they passed close by one of the big tabular bergs, and she pointed out the line of filth that edged the white ice like the ring around a bathtub that had been used by a chimney sweep.

  ‘Paraffin wax,’ she said, ‘and undissolved hydrocarbons.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that's only glacial striation.’

  ‘It's crude oil,’ she answered him. ‘I've sampled it. It was one of the reasons I took the guide job on Golden Adventurer, I wanted first-hand knowledge of these seas.’

  ‘But we are two thousand miles south of the tanker lanes.’

  ‘The beach at Shackleton Bay is thick with wax balls and crude droplet
s. We found oil-soaked penguins on Cape Alarm, dead and dying. They hit an oil slick within fifty miles of that isolated shore.’

  ‘I can hardly believe –‘Nick started, but she cut across him.

  ‘That's just it!’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to believe it. Just walk on by, as though it's another mugging victim lying on the sidewalk.’

  ‘You're right,’ Nick admitted grudgingly. ‘Very few people really care.’

  ‘A few dead penguins, a few little black tar balls sticking to your feet on the beach. It doesn't seem much to shout about, but it's what we cannot see that should terrify us. Those millions of tons of poisonous hydrocarbons that dissolve into the sea, that kill slowly and insidiously, but surely. That's what should really terrify us, Nicholas!’

  She had used his given name for the first time, and they were both acutely aware of it. They were silent again, staring intently at the big iceberg as it passed slowly. The sun had touched it with ethereal pinks and amethyst, but that dark line of poisonous filth was still there.

  ‘The world has to use fossil fuels, and we sailors have to transport them,’ he said at last.

  ‘But not at such appalling risks, not with an eye only to the profits. Not in the same greedy thoughtless grabbing petty way as man wiped out the whale, not at the cost of turning the sea into a stinking festering cesspool.’

  ‘There are unscrupulous owners!’ he agreed, and she cut across him angrily.

  ‘Sailing under flags of convenience, without control, ships built to dangerous standards, equipped with a single boiler-‘ she reeled out the charges and he was silent.

  ‘Then they waived the winter load-line for rounding the Cape of Good Hope in the southern winter, to enable them to carry that extra fifty thousand tons of crude. The Agulhas Bank, the most dangerous winter sea in the world, and they send overloaded tankers into it.’

  ‘That was criminal,’ he agreed.

  ‘Yet you were Chairman of Christy Marine, you had a representative on the Board of Control.’ She saw that she had made a mistake. His expression was suddenly ferocious. His anger seemed to crackle like electricity in the ruby gloom of the bridge. She felt an unaccountable flutter of real fear. She had forgotten what kind of man he was.

  But he turned away and made a slow circuit of the bridge, elaborately checking each of the gauges and instruments, and then he paused at the far wing and lit a cheroot. She ached to offer some token of reconciliation, but instinctively she knew not to do so. He was not the kind of man who respected compromise or retreat.

  He came back to her at last, and the glow of the cheroot lit his features so that she could see the anger had passed.

  ‘Christy Marine seems like another existence to me now,’ he said softly, and she could sense the deep pain of unhealed wounds. ‘Forgive me, your reference to it took me off balance. I did not realize that you know of my past history.’

  ‘Everybody on board knows.’

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded, and drew deeply on the cheroot before he spoke. ‘When I ran Christy Marine, I insisted on the highest standards of safety and seamanship for every one of our vessels. We opposed the Cape winter-line decision, and none of my tankers loaded to their summer-line on the Good Hope passage. None of my tankers made do with only one boiler, the design and engineering of every Christy Marine vessel was of the same standard as that ship there,’ he pointed back at Golden Adventurer, ’or this one here!’ and he stamped once on the deck.

  ‘Even the Golden Dawn?’ she asked softly, braving his anger again - but he merely nodded.

  ‘Golden Dawn,’ he repeated softly.’ It sounds such an absurdly presumptuous name, doesn't it? But I really thought of her as that, when I conceived her. The first million-ton tanker, with every refinement and safety feature that man has so far tested and proved. From inert gas scrubbers to independently articulated main tanks, not one boiler but four, just like one of the old White Star liners - she was really to be the golden dawn of crude oil transportation.’

  ‘However, I am no longer Chairman of Christy Marine, and I am no longer in control of Golden Dawn, neither her design nor her construction.’ His voice was hollow, and in the dim light his eyes seemed shrunken into their cavities like those of a skull. ‘Nor yet am I in control of her operation.’

  It was all turning out so badly; she did not want to argue with him, nor make him unhappy. However, she had stirred memories and regrets within him, and she wished vainly that she had not disturbed him so. Her instinct warned her she should leave him now.

  ‘Goodnight, Doctor Silver,’ he nodded noncommittally at her sudden plea of tiredness.

  ‘My name is Sam!’ she told him, wishing that she could comfort him in some way, any way, ‘or Samantha, if you prefer it.’

  ‘I do prefer it,’ he said, without smiling. ‘Goodnight, Samantha.

  ‘She was angry with both herself and him, angry that the good feeling between them had been destroyed, so she flashed at him:

  ‘You really are old-fashioned, aren't you?’ and hurried from the bridge.

  The following evening she almost did not go up to him, for she was ashamed of those parting words, for having pointed up their age difference so offensively. She knew he was aware of their differences, without being reminded. She had done herself harm, and she did not want to face him again.

  While she was in the shower of the guest cabin, she heard Tim Graham come clattering down the stairs on the other side of the thin bulkhead. She knew that Nicholas had relieved him.

  ‘I'm not going up,’ she told herself firmly, and took her time drying and talcuming and brushing out her hair before she clambered naked and still pink from the hot water into her bunk.

  She read for half an hour, a western that Beauty Baker had lent her, and it required all her concentration to follow the print, for her mind kept trying to wander. At last she gave an exclamation of self-disgust, threw back the blankets and began dressing.

  His relief and pleasure, when she appeared beside him, were transparent, and his smile was a princely welcome for her. She was suddenly very glad she had come, and this night she effortlessly steered past all the pitfalls.

  She asked him to explain how the Lloyd's Open Form contract worked, and she followed his explanations swiftly.

  ‘If they take into consideration the danger and difficulties involved in the salvage,’ she mused,’ you should be able to claim an enormous award.’

  ‘I'm going to ask for twenty per cent of the hull value.’

  ‘What is the hull value of Golden Adventurer?’

  And he told her. She was silent a moment as she checked his mental arithmetic.

  ‘That's six million dollars,’ she whispered in awe.

  ‘Give or take a few cents,’ he agreed.

  ‘But there isn't that much money in the world!’ She turned and stared back at the liner.

  Duncan Alexander is going to agree with you. Nick smiled a little grimly.

  But, she shook her head, ‘What would anybody do with that much money?’

  ‘I'm asking for six - but I won't get it. I'll walk away with three or four millions.’

  ‘Still, that's too much. Nobody could spend that much not if they tried for a lifetime.’

  ‘It's spent already. It will just about enable me to pay off my loans, launch my other tug, and to keep Ocean Salvage going for another few months.’

  ‘You owe three or four million dollars?’ She stared at him now in open wonder. I'd never sleep, not one minute would I be able to sleep.’

  ‘Money isn't for spending,’ he explained. ‘There is a limit to the amount of food you can eat, or clothes you can wear. Money is a game, the biggest most exciting game in town.’

  She listened attentively to it all, happy because tonight he was gay and excited with grand designs and further plans, and because he shared them with her.

  ‘What we will do is this, we'll come down here with both tugs and catch an iceberg.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, c
ome on!’

  ‘I'm not joking,’ he assured her, but laughing also. ‘We'll put tow-lines on a big berg. It may take a week to build up tow speed, but once we get it moving nothing will stop it. We will guide it up into the middle forties, catch the roaring forties and, just like the old wool clippers on the Australian passage, we will run our castings down. He moved to the chart-table, selected a large-scale chart of the Indian Ocean and beckoned her to join him.

  ‘You're serious.’ She stopped laughing, and stared at him again. ‘You really are serious, aren't you?’

  He nodded, still smiling, and traced it out with his finger. ‘Then we'll swing northwards, up into the Western Australian current, letting the flow carry us north in a great circle, until we hit the easterly monsoon and the north equatorial current!’ He described the circle, but she watched his face. They stood very close, but still not touching and she felt herself stirred by the timbre of his voice, as though to the touch of fingers. ‘We will cross the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa with the current pushing all the way, just in time to catch the south-westerly monsoon drift - right into the Persian Gulf!’ He straightened up and smiled again.

  ‘A hundred billion tons of fresh water delivered right into the driest and richest corner of the globe.’

  ‘But - but - she shook her head, it would melt!’

  ‘From a helicopter we spray it with a reflective polyurethane skin to lessen the effect of the sun, and we moor it in a shallow specially prepared dock where it will cool its own surrounds. Sure, it will melt, but not for a year or two and then we'll just go out and catch another one and bring it in, like roping wild horses.’

  ‘How would you handle it?’ she objected. ‘It's too big.’

  ‘My two tugs hustle forty-four thousand horses - we could pull in Everest, if we wanted.’

  ‘Yes, but once you get it to the Persian Gulf?’

  ‘We cut it into manageable hunks with a laser lance, and lift the hunks into a melting dam with an overhead crane.’

  She thought about it. ‘It could work,’ she admitted.