Hungry as the Sea (15 page)

Nick was there ahead of him. The engine room was flooded almost to the deck above and the surface was a thick stinking scum of oil and diesel, in which floated a mass of loose articles, most of them undefinable, but in the beam of his lantern Nick recognized a gumboot and a grease pot floating beside his head. The whole thick stinking soup rose and fell and agitated with the push of the current through the rent.

The lenses of their lanterns were smeared with the oily filth and threw grotesque shadows into the cavernous depths, but Nick could just make out the deck above him, and the dark opening of the vertical ventilation shaft. He wiped the filth from his visor and saw what he wanted to see and the cold was spreading up his leg. He asked brusquely, “Okay, Chief?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

There were sickening moments of panic when Nick thought they had lost the line to the opening. It had sagged and wrapped around a steam pipe. Nick freed it and then sank down to the glimmer of light through the gash.

He judged his moment carefully, the return was more dangerous than the entry, for the raw bright metal had been driven in by the ice, like the petals of a sunflower - or the fangs in a shark’s jaw. He used the suck of water and shot through without a touch, turning and finning to wait for Vin Baker.

The Australian came through in the next rush of water, but Nick saw him flicked sideways by the current, and he struck the jagged opening a touching blow. There was instantly a roaring rush of escaping oxygen from his breathing bag, as the steel split it wide, and for a moment the chief was obscured in the silver cloud of gas that was his life’s breath.

“Oh God, I’m snagged,” he shouted, clutching helplessly at his empty bag plummeting sharply into the green depths at the drastic change in his buoyance. The heavily leaded belt around his waist had been weighted to counter the flotation of the oxygen bag, and he went down like a gannet diving on a shoal of sardine.

Nick saw instantly what was about to happen. The current had him - it was dragging him down under the hull, sucking him under that hammering steel bottom, where he would be crushed against the stony beach by twenty-two thousand tons of pounding steel.

Nick went head down, finning desperately to catch the swirling body which tumbled like a leaf in high wind. He had a fleeting glimpse of Baker’s face, contorted with terror and lack of breath, the glass visor of his helmet already swamping with icy water as the pressure spurted through the non-return valve. The Chief’s headset microphone squealed once and then went dead as the water shorted it out.

“Drop your belt,” yelled Nick, but Baker did not respond; he had not heard, his headset had gone and instead he fought ineffectually in the swirling current, drawn inexorably down to brutal death.

Nick got a hand to him and threw back with all his strength on his fins to check their downward plunge, but still they went down and Nick’s right hand was clumsy with cold and the double thickness of his mittens as he groped for the quick-release on the Chief’s belt.

He hit the rounded bottom of the great hull with his shoulder, and felt them dragged under to where clouds of sediment blew like smoke from the working of the keel. Locked together like a couple of waltzing dancers, they swung around and he saw the keel, like the blade of a guillotine, rise up high above them. He could not reach the Chief’s release toggle.

There were only micro-seconds in which to go for his one other chance.

He hit his own release and the thick belt with thirty-five pounds of lead fell away from Nick’s waist; with it went the buddy line that would guide them back to the waiting Zodiac, for it had been clipped into the back of the belt.

The abrupt loss of weight checked their downward plunge, and fighting with all the strength of his legs, Nick was just able to hold them clear of the great keel as it came swinging downwards.

Within ten feet of them, steel struck stone with a force that rang in nick’s eardrum like a bronze gong but he had an armlock on the Chief’s struggling body, and now at last his right hand found the release toggle on the other man’s belt.

He hit it, and another thirty-five pounds of lead dropped away. They began to rise, up along the hogging steel hull, faster and faster as the oxygen in Nick’s bag expanded with the release of pressure. Now their plight was every bit as desperate, for they were racing upwards to a roof of solid ice with enough speed to break bone or crack a skull.

Nick emptied his lungs, exhaling on a single continuous breath, and at the same time opened the valve to vent his bag, blowing away the precious life-giving gas in an attempt to check their rise - yet still they went into the ice with a force that would have stunned them both, had Nick not twisted over and caught it on his shoulder and outflung arm. They were pinned there under the ice by the cork-like buoyancy of their rubber suits and the remaining gas in Nick’s bag.

With mild and detached surprise Nick saw that the lower side of the ice pack was not a smooth sheet, but was worked into ridges and pinnacles, into weird flowing shapes like some abstract sculpture in pale green glass. It was only a fleeting moment that he looked at it, for beside him Baker was drowning. His helmet was flooded with icy water and his face was empurpled and his mouth contorted into a horrible rictus; already his movements were becoming spasmodic and uncoordinated, as he struggled for breath.

Nick realized that haste would kill them both now. He had to work fast but deliberately — and he held Baker to him as he cracked the valve on his steel oxygen bottle, reinflating his chest bag. With his right hand, he began to unscrew the breathing pipe connection into the side of Baker’s helmet. It was slow, too slow. He needed touch for this delicate work.

He thought, This could cost me my right hand, and he stripped off the thick mitten in a single angry gesture. Now he could feel - for the few seconds until the cold paralysed his fingers. The connection came free and while he worked, Nick was pumping his lungs like a bellows, hyperventilating, washing his blood with pure oxygen until he felt light-headed and dizzy.

One last sweet breath, and then he unscrewed his own hose connection; icy water flooded through the valve but he held his head at an angle to trap oxygen in the top of his helmet, keeping his nose and eyes clear, and he rescrewed his own hose into Baker’s helmet with fingers that no longer had feeling.

He held the Chief’s body close to his chest, embracing like lovers, and he cracked the last of the oxygen from his bottle. There was just sufficient pressure of gas left to expunge the water from Baker’s helmet. It blew out with an explosive hiss through the valve, and Nick watched carefully with his face only inches from Baker’s.

The Chief was choking and coughing, gulping and gasping at the rush of cold oxygen, his eyes watery and unseeing his spectacles blown awry and the lenses obscured by, sea water, but then Nick felt his chest begin to swell and subside. Baker was breathing again, which is more than I am doing Nick thought grimly - and then suddenly he realized for the first time that he had lost the guide line with his weight belt.

He did not know in which direction was the shore, nor which way to swim to reach the Zodiac. He was utterly disorientated, and desperately he peered through his half flooded visor for sight of the
Golden Adventurer’s
hull to align himself. She was not there, gone in the misty green gloom - and he felt the first heave of his lungs as they demanded air. And as he denied his body the driving need to breathe, he felt the fear that had flickered deep within him flare up into true terror, swiftly becoming cold driving panic.

A suicidal urge to tear at the green ice roof of this watery tomb almost overwhelmed him. He wanted to try and rip his way through it with bare freezing hands to reach the precious air.

Then, just before panic completely obliterated his reason, he remembered the compass on his wrist. Even then his brain was sluggish, beginning to starve for oxygen, and it took precious seconds working out the reciprocal of his original bearing. As he leaned forward to read the compass, more sea water spurted into his helmet, spiking needles of icy cold agony into the sinuses of his cheeks and forehead, making the teeth ache in his jaws, so he gasped involuntarily and immediately choked.

Still holding Baker to him, linked by the thick black umbilical cord of his oxygen hose, Nick began to swim out on the reciprocal compass heading. Immediately his lungs began to pump, convulsing in involuntary spasms, like those of childbirth, craving air, and he swam on.

With his head thrown back slightly he saw that the sheet of ice moved slowly above him; at times, when the current held them it moved not at all, and it required all his selfcontrol to keep finning doggedly, then the current relaxed its grip and they moved forward again, but achingly slowly.

He had time then to realize how exquisitely beautiful was the ice roof; translucent, wonderously carved and sculptured — and suddenly he remembered standing hand in hand with Chantelle beneath the arched roof of the Chartres cathedral, staring up in awe. The pain in his chest subsided, the need to breathe passed, but he did not recognize that as the sign of mortal danger, nor the images that formed before his eyes as the fantasy of a brain deprived of oxygen and slowly dying.

Chantelle’s face was before him then, glowing hair soft and thick and glossy as a butterfly’s wing, huge dark eyes and that wide mouth so full of the promise of delight and warmth and love.

I loved you, he thought. I really loved you.

And again the image changed. He saw again the incredible slippery explosive liquid burst with which his son was born, heard that queruous cry as a dripping an wet and hairless from the rubber-gloved hand, and felt again the soul-consuming wonder and joy.

A drowning man - Nick recognized at last what was happening to him. He knew then he was dying, but the panic had passed, as the cold had passed also, and the terror. He swam on, dreamlike, into the green mists. Then he realized that his own legs were no longer moving; he lay relaxed not breathing, not feeling, and it was Baker’s body that was thrusting and working against him.

Nick peered into the glass visor still only inches from his eyes, and he saw that Baker’s face was set and determined. He was gulping the pure sweet oxygen and gained strength with each breath, driving on strongly.

“You beauty,” whispered Nick dreamily, and felt the water shoot into his throat, but there was no pain.

Another image formed before him, an Arrow head-class yacht with spinnaker set, running free across a bright Mediterranean sea, and his son at the tiller, the dense tumble of curls that covered his small neat head fluttering in the wind, and the same velvety dark eyes as his mother’s in the sun-tanned oval of his face as he laughed.

Don’t let her run by the lee, Peter, Nicholas wanted to shout to his son, but the image faded into blackness. He thought for a moment that he had passed into unconsciousness, but then he realized suddenly that it was the black rubber bottom of the Zodiac only inches from his eyes, and that the rough hands that dragged him upwards, lifting him and tearing loose the fastening of his helmet, were not part of the fantasy.

Propped against the pillowed gunwale of the Zodiac, held by the two boatmen from falling backwards, the first breaths of sub-zero air were too rich for his starved lungs, and Nick coughed and vomited weakly down the front of his suit.

Chapter 7

Nick came out of the shower cabinet. The cabin was thick with steam, and his body glowed dull angry red from the almost boiling water. He wrapped the towel around his waist as he stepped through into his night cabin.

Baker slouched in the armchair at the foot of his bunk. He wore fresh overalls, his hair stood up in little damp spikes around the shaven spot where Angel’s cat-gut stitches still held the scabbed wound closed. One of the side frames of his spectacles had snapped during those desperate minutes below
Golden Adventurer’s
stern, and Baker had repaired it with black insulating tape.

He held two glasses in his left hand, and, a big flat brown bottle of liquor in the other. He poured two heavy slugs into the glasses as Nick paused in the bathroom door, and the sweet, rich aroma smelled like the sugar-cane fields of northern Queensland.

Baker passed a glass to Nick, and then showed him the bottle’s yellow label. “Bundaberg rum,” he announced, “the dinky die stuff, sport!”

Nick recognized both the offer of liquor and the salutation as probably the highest accolade the chief would ever give another human being. Nick sniffed the dark honey-brown liquor and then took it in a single toss, swirled it once around his mouth, swallowed, shuddered like a spaniel shaking off water droplets, exhaled and said: “It’s still the finest rum in the world.” Dutifully, he said what was expected of him, and held out his glass.

“The Mate asked me to give you a message,” said Baker as he poured another shot for each of them. “Glass hit 103.5 and now it s diving like a dingo into its hole — back to 102.0 already. It’s going to blow — is it ever going to blow!”

They regarded each other over the rims of the glasses.

“We’ve wasted almost two hours Beauty,” Nick told him, and Baker blinked at the unlikely name, then grinned crookedly as he accepted it.

“How are you going to plug that hull?”

“I’ve got ten men at work already. We are going to fother a sail into a collision mat.” Baker blinked again, then shook his head in disbelief.

“That’s Hornblower stuff.”

“The Witch of Endor,” Nick agreed. “So you can read?”

“You haven’t got pressure to drive it home,” Baker objected. “The trapped air from the engine room will blow it out.”

“I’m going to run a wire down the ventilation shaft of the engine room and out through the gash. We’ll fix the collision mat outside the hull and winch it home with the wire.”

Baker stared at him for five seconds while he examined the proposition. A sail was fothered by threading the thick canvas with thousands of strands of unravelled oakum until it resembled a huge shaggy doormat. When this was placed over an aperture below a ship’s waterline, the pressure of water forced it into the hole, and the water swelled the mass of fibre until it formed an almost watertight plug.