Hungry as the Sea (24 page)

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 percent 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 million.”

“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, come 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 stiffed 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 dryest 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.

“It will work,” he told her. “I’ve sold the idea to the Saudis already. They are already building the dock and the dams. We’ll give them water at one hundredth the cost of us nuclear condensers on sea water, and without the risk of radio-active contamination.”

She was absorbed with his vision, and he with hers. As they talked deep into the long watches of the night, they drew closer in spirit only.Although each of them treasured those shared hours, somehow neither could bridge the narrow chasm between friendliness and real intimacy.

She was instinctively aware of his reserves, that he was a man who had considered life and established his code by which to live it. She guessed that he did nothing unless it was deeply felt, and that a casual physical relationship would offer no attraction to him; she knew of the turmoil to which his life had so recently been reduced, and that he was pulling himself out of that by main strength, but that he was now wary of further hurt. There was time, she told herself, plenty of time – but
Warlock
bore steadily north by north-east, dragging her crippled ward up through the roaring forties; those notorious winds treated her kindly and she made good the six knots that Nick had hoped for.

On board Warlock, the attitude of the officers towards Samantha Silver changed from fawning adulation to wistful respect. Every one of them knew of the nightly ritual of the eight-to-midnight watch.

“Bloody cradle-snatcher!” groused Tim Graham.

“Mr. Graham, it is fortunate I did not hear that remark,” David Allen warned him with glacial coldness – but they all resented Nicholas Berg, it was unfair competition, yet they kept a new respectful distance from the girl, not one of them daring to challenge the herd bull.

The time that Samantha had looked upon as endless was running out now, and she closed her mind to it. Even when David Allen showed her the fuzzy luminescence of the African continent on the extreme range of the radar-screen, she pretended to herself that it would go on like this – if not for ever, at least until something special happened.

During the long voyage up from Shackleton Bay, Samantha had streamed a very fine-meshed net from
Warlock’s
stern, collecting an incredible variety of krill and plankton and other microscopic marine life. Angel had grudgingly given her a small corner of his scullery in return for her services as honorary assistant under-chef and unpaid waitress, and she spent many absorbed hours there each day, identifying and preserving her specimens.

She was working there when the helicopter came out to Warlock. She looked up at the buffeting of the machine’s rotors as they changed into fine pitch for the landing on
Warlock’s
high-deck, and she was tempted to go up like every idle and curious hand on board, but she was in the middle of staining a slide, and somehow she resented the encroachment on this little island of her happiness. She worked on, but now her pleasure was spoiled, and she cocked her head when she heard the roar of the rotors as the helicopter rose from the deck again and she was left with a sense of foreboding.

Angel came in from the deck, wiping his hands on his apron and he paused in the doorway. “You didn’t tell me he was going, dearie.”

“What do you mean?” Samantha looked up at him, startled.

“Your boyfriend, darling. Socks and toothbrush and all.” Angel watched her shrewdly. “Don’t tell me he didn’t even kiss you goodbye.” She dropped the glass slide into the stainless steel sink and it snapped in half. She was panting as she gripped the rail of the upper deck and stared after the cumbersome yellow machine. It flew low across the green wind-chopped sea, humpbacked and nose low, still close enough to read the operating company’s name COURTLINE emblazoned on its fuselage, but it dwindled swiftly towards the far blue line of mountains.

Chapter 13

Nick Berg sat in the jump seat between the two pilots of the big S. 58T Sikorsky and looked ahead towards the flat silhouette of Table Mountain. It was overlaid by a thick mattress of snowy cloud, at the south-easterly wind swirled across its summit.

From their altitude of a mere thousand feet, there were still five big tankers in sight, ploughing stolidly through the green sea on their endless odyssey, seeming to be alien to their element not designed to live in harmony with it, but to oppose every movement of the waters. Even in this low sea, they wore thick garlands of white at their stubby rounded bows, and Nick watched one of them dip suddenly and take spray as high as her foremast. In any sort of blow, she would be like a pier with pylons set on solid ground. The seas would break right over her. It was not the way a ship should be, and now he twisted in his seat and looked back.

Far behind them,
Warlock
was still visible. Even at this distance, and despite the fact that she was dwarfed by her charge, her lines pleased the seaman in him. She looked good, but that backward glance invoked a pang of regret that he had been so stubbornly trying to ignore – and he had a vivid image of green eyes and hair of platinum and gold.

His regret was spiced by the persistent notion that he had been cowardly. He had left
Warlock
without being able to bring himself to say goodbye to the girl, and he knew why he had done so. He would not take the chance of making a fool of himself. He grimaced with distaste, as he remembered her exact words, “You really are old-fashioned, aren’t you?” There was something vaguely repulsive in a middle-aged man lusting after young flesh – and he supposed he must now look upon himself as middle-aged. In six months he would be forty years of age, and he did not really expect to live to eighty. So he was in the middle of the road.

He had always scorned those grey, lined, balding, unattractive little men with big cigars, sitting in expensive restaurants with pretty young girls beside them, the young thing pretending to hang on every pearl-like word, while her eyes focused beyond his shoulder – on some younger But still, it had been cowardice. She had become a friend during those weeks, and she could hardly have been aware of the emotions that she had aroused in him during those long dark hours on
Warlock’s
bridge. She was not to blame for his unruly passions, in no way had she encouraged him to believe that he was more than just an older man, not even a father figure, but just someone with whom to pass an otherwise empty hour. She had been as friendly and cheerful to everyone else on board Warlock, from the Mate to the cook.

He really had owed her the common courtesy of a handshake and an assurance of the pleasure he had taken from her company, but he had not been certain he could restrict it to that.

He winced again as he imagined her horror as he blurted out some sort of declaration, some proposal to prolong their relationship or alter its structure into something more intimate, her disenchantment when she realized that behind the facade of the mature and cultured man, he was just as grimy an old lecher as the furtive drooling browsers in the porno-shops of Times Square.

Let it go, he had decided. No matter that he was probably in better physical shape now than he had been at twenty-five, to Dr. Samantha silver he was an old man and he had a frightening vision of an episode from his own youth.

A woman, a friend of his mother’s, had trapped the nineteen-year-old Nicholas alone one rainy day in the old beach house at Martha’s vineyard. He remembered his own revulsion at the sagging white flesh, the wrinkles, the lines of strain across her belly and breasts, and the oldness of her. She would then have been a woman of forty, the same as he was now, and he had done her the service she required out of some obligation of pity, but afterwards he had scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled and he had stood under the shower for almost an hour.

It was one of the cruel deceits of life that a person aged from the outside. He had thought of himself in the fullness of his physical and mental powers, especially now after bringing in
Golden Adventurer
. He was ready for them to lead on the dragons and he would tear out their jugulars with his bare hands – then she had called him an old-fashioned thing, and he had realized that the sexual fantasy which was slowly becoming an obsession must be associated with the male menopause, a sorry symptom of the ageing process of which he had not been conscious until then. He grinned wryly at the thought.

The girl would probably hardly notice that he had left the ship, at the worst might be a little piqued by of manners, but in a week would have forgotten his name. As for himself, there was enough, and more than enough to fill the days ahead, so that the image of a slim young body and that precious mane of silver and gold would fade until it became the fairy tale it really was.

Resolutely he turned in the jump seat and looked ahead. Always look ahead, there are never regrets in that direction.

They clattered in over False Bay, crossing the narrow isthmus of the Cape Peninsula under the bulk of the cloudcapped mountain, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic in under ten minutes.

He saw the gathering, like vultures at the lion kill, as the Sikorsky lowered to her roost on the helipad within the main harbour area of Table Bay.

As Nick jumped down, ducking instinctively under the still-turning rotors, they surged forward, ignoring the efforts of the Courtline dispatcher to keep the pad clear; they were led by a big red-faced man with a scorched looking bald head and the furry arms of a tame bear. “Larry Fry, Mr. Berg,” he growled. “You remember me?”

“Hello, Larry.” He was the local manager for Bach Wackie & Co, Nick’s agents. “I thought you might say a few words to the Press.” But the journalists swarmed around Nick now, demanding, jostling each other, their camaras firing flash bulbs.

Nick felt his irritation flare, and he needed a deep breath and a conscious effort to control his anger. “All right, lads and ladies.” He held up both hands, and grinned that special boyish grin. They were doing a tough job, he reminded himself. It couldn’t be easy to be forced daily into the company of rich and successful men, grabbing for tidbits, and being grossly underpaid for your efforts with the long-term expectation of ulcers and cirrhosis of the liver.