Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Jules’ great-great-grandfather charged with the Emperor's cavalry at Quatre Bras,’ Nick explained. ‘He is a man without fear.

  ‘You will enjoy La Rotisserie,’ Jules told Samantha. ‘I can only afford to eat there when I find somebody rich who wishes a favour of me.’

  ‘How do you know I want a favour?’ Nick asked from the back seat, clinging to the door-handle.

  ‘Three telegrams, a telephone call from Bermuda - another from Johannesburg,’ Jules chuckled fruitily and winked at Samantha. ‘You think I believe Nicholas Berg wants to discuss old times? You think I believe he feels so deeply for his old friend, who taught him everything he knows? A man who treated him like a son, and whom he blatantly robbed –‘ Jules sped across the Loire bridge and plunged into that tangled web of narrow one-way streets and teeming traffic which is Nantes, a way opened for him miraculously.

  In the Place Briand, he handed Samantha gallantly from the Citron, and in the restaurant he puffed out his cheeks and made little anxious clucking and tut-tutting noises, as Nicholas discussed the wine list with the sommelier - but he nodded reluctant approval when they settled on a Chablis Moutonne and a Chambertin-Clos-de-Beze, then he applied himself with equal gusto to the food, the wine and Samantha, 'You can tell a woman who is made for life and love, by the way she eats,’ and when Samantha made wide lascivious eyes at him over her trout, Nicholas expected him to crow like a cockerel.

  Only when the cognac was in front of them, and both he and Nick had lit cheroots, did he demand abruptly: ‘So, now, Nicholas, I am in a good mood. Ask me.’

  ‘I need a Master for my new tug,’ said Nick, and Jules veiled his face behind a thick blue curtain of cigar smoke.

  They fenced like masters of epee all the way from Nantes to St Nazaire.

  ‘Those ships you build, Nicholas, are not tugs. They are fancy toys, floating bordellos - all those gimmicks and gadgets.’

  ‘Those gimmicks and gadgets enabled me to deal with Christy Marine while you still hadn't realized that I was within a thousand miles.’ Jules blew out his cheeks and muttered to himself.

  ‘Twenty-two thousand horsepower, c'est ridicule! They are over-powered.’

  ‘I needed every single one of those horses when I pulled Golden Adventurer off Cape Alarm. ‘

  ‘Nicholas, do not keep reminding me of that shameful episode.’ He turned to Samantha. ‘I am hungry, ma petite, and in the next village there is a patisserie,’ he sighed and kissed his bunched fingers,’ you will adore the pastry.’

  ‘Try me,’ she invited, and Jules had found a soul mate.

  ‘Those fancy propellers - variable pitch - ouf!’ Jules spoke through a mouthful of pastry, and there was whipped cream on his moustache.

  ‘I can make twenty-five knots and then slam Warlock into reverse thrust and stop her within her own length.’ Jules changed pace, and attacked from a new direction.

  ‘You'll never find full employment for two big expensive ships like that.’

  ‘I'm -going to need four, not two,’ Nick contradicted him. ‘We are going to catch icebergs,’ and Jules forgot to chew, as he listened intently for the next ten minutes. ‘One of the beauties of the iceberg scheme is that all my ships will be operating right on the tanker lanes, the busiest shipping lanes in all the oceans-’

  ‘Nicholas,’ Jules shook his head in admiration, ‘you move too fast for me. I am an old man, old-fashioned-‘

  ‘You're not old,’ Samantha told him firmly. ‘You're only just in your prime.’ And Jules threw up both hands theatrically.

  ‘Now you have a pretty girl heaping flattery on my bowed grey head,’ he looked at Nicholas; ‘is no trick too deceitful for you?’

  It was snowing the next morning, a slow sparse sprinkling from a grey woollen sky, when they drove into St Nazaire from the little seaside resort of La Baule twenty-five kilometres up the Atlantic coast.

  Jules had a small flat in one of the apartment blocks. It was a convenient arrangement, for La Mouette, his command, was owned by a Breton company and St Nazaire was her home port. It was a mere twenty-minute drive before they made out the elegant arch of the suspension bridge which crosses the estuarine mouth of the Loire River at St Nazaire.

  Jules drove through the narrow streets of that area of the docks just below the bridge which comprises the sprawling ship-building yard of Construction Navale Atlantique, one of the three largest ship-building companies in Europe, The slipways for the larger vessels, the bulk carriers and naval craft, faced directly on to the wide smooth reach of the river; but the ways for the small vessels backed on to the inner harbour.

  So Jules parked the Citron at the security gates nearest the inner harbour, and they walked through to where Charles Gras was waiting for them in his offices overlooking the inner basin.

  ‘Nicholas, it is good to see you again.’ Gras was one of Atlantique's top engineers, a tall stooped man with a pale face and lank black hair that fell to his eyebrows, he had the sharp foxy Parisian features and quick bright eyes that belied the morose unsmiling manner.

  He and Nicholas had known each other many years, and they used the familiar ‘tu’ form of address.

  Charles Gras changed to heavily accented English when he was introduced to Samantha, and back to French when he asked Nicholas, ‘If I know you, you will want to go directly to see your ship now, n'est-ce pas?’

  Sea Witch stood high on her ways, and although she was an identical twin to Warlock, she seemed almost twice her size with her underwater hull exposed. Despite the fact that the superstructure was incomplete and she was painted in the drab oxide red of marine primer, yet it was impossible to disguise the symmetrically functional beauty of her lines.

  Jules puffed, and muttered ‘Bordello’ and made remarks about 'Admiral Berg and his battleship', but he could not hide the gleam in his eye as he strutted about the uncompleted navigation bridge, or listened intently as Charles Gras explained the electronic equipment and the other refinements that made the ship so fast, efficient and manoeuvrable.

  Nick realized that the two experts should be left alone now to convince each other; it was clear that although this was their first meeting the two of them had established immediate rapport.

  ‘Come.’ Nick quietly took Samantha's arm and they stepped carefully around the scaffolding and loose equipment, picking their way through groups of workmen to the upper deck.

  The snow had stopped, but a razor of a wind snickered in from the Atlantic. They found a sheltered corner, and Samantha pressed close to Nick, snuggling into the circle of his arm.

  High on her ways, Sea Witch gave them a sweeping view, through the forest of construction cranes, over the roofs of the warehouses and offices to the river slipways where the keels of the truly big hulls were laid down.

  ‘You spoke about Golden Dawn,’ Nick said. ‘There she is.’ It took some moments for Samantha to realize she was looking at a ship.

  ‘My God,’ she breathed. ‘It's so big.’

  ‘They don't come bigger, ’he agreed.

  The structure of steel was almost a mile and a half long, three city blocks, and the hull was as tall as a five-storey building, while the navigation tower was another hundred feet higher than that.

  Samantha shook her head. ‘It's beyond belief. It looks like - like a city! It's terrifying to think of that thing afloat.’

  ‘That is only the main hull, the tank pods have been constructed in Japan. The last I heard is that they are under tow direct to the Persian Gulf.’

  Nick stared solemnly across the ship, blinking his eyes against the stinging wind.

  ‘I must have been out of my mind,’ he whispered, ‘to dream up a monster like that.’ But there was a touch of defiant pride in his tone.

  ‘It's so big - beyond imagination,’ she encouraged him to talk about it. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘It's not a single vessel,’ he explained. 'No harbour in the world could take a ship that size, it could not even approach the continental
United States, for that matter, there just is not enough water to float it.’

  ‘Yes?’ She loved to listen to him expound his vision, she loved to hear the force and power of his convictions.

  ‘What you're seeing is the carrying platform, the accommodation and the main power source.’ He held her closer. ‘On to that, we attach the four tank pods, each one of them capable of carrying a quarter of a million tons of crude oil, each tank almost as large as the biggest ship afloat.’

  He was still explaining the concept while they sat at lunch, and Charles Gras and Jules Levoisin listened as avidly as she did.

  ‘A single rigid hull of those dimensions would crack and break up in heavy seas,’ he took the cruet set and used it to demonstrate, ‘but the four individual pods have been designed so that they can move independently of each other. This gives them the ability to ride and absorb the movement of heavy seas. It is the most important principle of ship construction, a hull must ride the water - not try to oppose it.’

  Across the table, Charles Gras nodded lugubrious agreement.

  ‘The tank pods hive on to the main hull, and are carried upon it like remora on the body of a shark, not using their own propulsion systems, but relying on the multiple boilers and quadruple screws of the main hull to carry them across the oceans.’ He pushed the cruet set around the table and they all watched it with fascination. ‘Then, when it reaches the continental shelf opposite the shore discharge site, the main hull anchors, forty or fifty, even a hundred miles offshore, detaches one or two or all of its pod tanks, and they make those last few miles under their own propulsion. In protected water and in chosen weather conditions, their propulsion systems will handle them safely. Then the empty pod ballasts itself and returns to hook on to the main hull.’

  As he spoke, Nicholas detached the salt cellar from the cruet and docked it against Samantha's plate. The two Frenchmen were silent, staring at the silver salt cellar, but Samantha watched Nick's face. It was burned dark by the sun now, lean and handsome, and he seemed charged and vital, like a thoroughbred horse in peak of training, and she was proud of him, proud of the force of his personality that made other men listen when he spoke, proud of the imagination and the courage it took to conceive and then put into operation a project of this magnitude. Even though it were no longer his - yet his had been the vision.

  Now Nicholas was talking again. ‘Civilization is addicted to liquid fossil fuels. Without them, it would be forced into withdrawal trauma too horrible to contemplate. If then we have to use crude, let's pipe it out of the earth, transport and ship it with all possible precautions to protect ourselves from its side effects-‘

  ‘Nicholas,’ Charles Gras interrupted him abruptly. ‘When last did you inspect the drawings of Golden Dawn?’

  Nick paused, taken in full stride and a little off balance. He frowned as he cast back. ‘I walked out of Christy Marine just over a year ago.’ And the darkness of those days settled upon him, making his eyes bleak.

  ‘A year ago we had not even been awarded the contract for the construction of Golden Dawn.’ Charles Gras twisted the stem of his wine glass between his fingers, and thrust out his bottom lip. ‘The ship you have just described to us is very different from the ship we are building out there.’

  ‘In what way, Charles?’ Nick's concern was immediate, a father hearing of radical surgery upon his first-born.

  ‘The concept is the same. The mother vessel and the four tank pods, but –‘ Charles shrugged, that eloquent Gallic gesture, ‘it would be easier to show it to you. Immediately after lunch.’

  ‘D'accord,’ Jules Levoisin nodded. ‘But on the condition that it does not interfere with the further enjoyment of this fine meal.’ He nudged Nicholas. ‘If you eat with a scowl on your face, mon vieux, you will grow yourself ulcers like a bunch of Loire grapes.’

  Standing beneath the bulk of Golden Dawn, she seemed to reach up into that low grey snow-sky, like a mighty alp of steel. The men working on the giddy heights of her scaffolding were small as insects, and quite unbelievably, as Samantha stared up at them, a little torn streamer of wet grey cloud, coming up the Loire basin from the sea, blew over the ship, obscuring the top of her navigation bridge for a few moments.

  ‘She reaches up to the clouds,’ said Nick beside her, and the pride was in his voice as he turned back to Charles Gras. ‘She looks good?’ It was a question, not a statement. ‘She looks like the ship I planned.’

  ‘Come, Nicholas.’

  The little party picked its way through the chaos of the yard. The squeal of power cranes and the rumble of heavy steel transporters, the electric hissing crackle of the huge automatic running welders combined with the roaring gunfire barrage of the riveters into a cacophony that numbed the senses. The scaffolding and hoist systems formed an almost impenetrable forest about the mountainous hull, and steel and concrete were glistening wet and rimmed with thin clear ice.

  It was a long walk through the crowded yard, almost twenty minutes merely to round the tanker’s stern - and suddenly Nicholas stopped so abruptly that Samantha collided with him and might have fallen on the icy concrete, but he caught her arm and held her as he stared up at the bulbous stern.

  It formed a great overhanging roof like that of a medieval cathedral, so that Nick's head was flung back, and the grip on her arm tightened so fiercely that she protested. He seemed not to hear, but went on staring upwards.

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Gras nodded, and the lank black hair flopped like against his forehead. ‘That is one difference from the ship you designed.’

  The propeller was in lustrous ferro-bronze, six-bladed, each shaped with the beauty and symmetry of a butterfly's wing, but so enormous as to make the comparison laughable. It was so big that not even the bulk of Golden Dawn's own hull could dwarf it, each separate blade was longer and broader than the full wingspan of a jumbo jet airliner, a gargantuan sculpture in gleaming metal.

  ‘One!’ whispered Nick. ‘One only.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Gras agreed, 'Not four - but one propeller only. Also, Nicholas, it is fixed pitch.’

  They were all silent as they rode up in the cage of the hoist. The hoist ran up the outside of the hull to the level of the main deck, and though the wind searched for them remorselessly through the open mesh of the cage, it was not the cold that kept them silent.

  The engine compartment was an echoing cavern, harshly lit by the overhead floodlights, and they stood high on one of the overhead steel catwalks looking down fifty feet on to the boiler and condensers of the main engine.

  Nick stared down for almost five minutes. He asked no questions, made no but at last he turned to Charles Gras and nodded once curtly.

  ‘All right. I've seen enough,’ he said, and the engineer led them to the elevator station. Again they rode upwards. It was like being in a modern office block - the polished chrome and wood panelling of the elevator, the carpeted passageways high in the navigation tower along which Charles Gras led them to the Master's suite and unlocked the carved mahogany doorway with a key from his watch chain.

  Jules Levoisin looked slowly about the suite and shook his head wonderingly. ‘Ah, this is the way to live,’ he breathed. 'Nicholas, I absolutely insist that the Master's quarters of Sea Witch be decorated like this.’

  Nick did not smile, but crossed to the view windows that looked forward along the tanker's main deck to her round blunt unlovely prow a mile and a quarter away. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, legs apart, chin thrust out angrily and nobody else spoke while Charles Gras opened the elaborate bar and poured cognac into the crystal brandy balloons. He carried a glass to Nick who turned away from the window.

  ‘Thank you, Charles, I need something to warm the chill in my guts.’ Nick sipped the cognac and rolled it on his tongue as he looked slowly around the opulent cabin.

  It occupied almost half the width of the navigation bridge, and was large enough to house a diplomatic reception. Duncan Alexander had picked a good
decorator to do the job, and without the view from the window it might have been an elegant Fifth Avenue New York apartment, or one of those penthouses high on the cliffs above Monte Carlo, overlooking the harbour.

  Slowly Nick crossed the thick green carpet, woven with the house device, the entwined letters C and M for Christy Marine, and he stopped before the Degas in its place of honour above the marble fireplace.

  He remembered Chantelle's bubbling joy at the purchase of that painting. It was one of Degas ballet pieces, soft, almost luminous light on the limbs of the dancers, and, remembering the unfailing delight that Chantelle had taken in it during the years, he was amazed that she had allowed it to be used on board one of the company ships, and that it was left here virtually unguarded and vulnerable. That painting was worth a quarter of a million pounds.

  He leaned closer to it, and only then did he realize how clever a copy of the original it was. He shook his head in dismissal.

  ‘The owners were advised that the sea air may damage the original,’ Charles Gras shrugged, and spread his hands deprecatingly, 'and not many people would know the difference.’

  That was typical of Duncan Alexander,’ Nicholas thought savagely. ‘It could only be his idea, the sharp accountant's brain. The conviction that it was possible to fool all of the people all of the time.’

  Everybody knew that Chantelle owned that work, therefore nobody would doubt its authenticity. That's the way Duncan Alexander would reason it. It could not be Chantelle's idea. She had never been one to accept anything that was sham or dross; it was a measure of the power that he exerted over her, for her to go along with this cheap little fraud.

  Nicholas indicated the forgery with his glass and spoke directly to Charles Gras.

  ‘This is a cheat,’ he spoke quietly, his anger contained and controlled, ‘but it is harmless.’ Now he turned away from it and, with a wider gesture that embraced the whole ship, went on, ‘But this other cheat, this enormous fraud,’ he paused to control the metallic edge that had entered his tone, going on quietly again, ‘this is a vicious, murderous gamble he is taking. He has bastardized the entire concept of the scheme. One propeller instead of four - it cannot manoeuvre a hull of these dimensions with safety in any hazardous situation, it cannot deliver sufficient thrust to avoid collision, to fight her off a lee shore, to handle heavy seas.’ Nick stopped, and his voice dropped even lower, yet somehow it was more compelling. ‘This ship cannot, by all moral and natural laws, be operated on a single boiler. My design called for eight separate boilers and condensers, the standard set for the old White Star and Cunard Lines. But Duncan Alexander has installed a single boiler system. ‘There is no back-up, no fail-safe - a few gallons of sea water in the system could disable this monster.’