Hungry as the Sea (28 page)

“Yes.” Then Nick added hastily, But you don’t have to take that as a personal challenge. Nicholas had come to stand in awe of Samantha’s appetites.

They stayed overnight at the Georges V in Paris and caught the midmorning TAT flight down to Nantes, the nearest airfield to the shipyards at St Nazaire, and Jules Levoisin was there to meet them at the Chateau Bougon field.

“Nicholas!” he shouted joyfully, and stood on tiptoe to buss both his cheeks, enveloping him in a fragrant cloud of eau de Cologne and pomade. “You are a pirate Nicholas, you stole that ship from under my nose. I hate you.” He held Nicholas at arm’s length. “I warned you not to take the oh, didn’t I?”

“You did, Jules, you did.”

“So why do you make a fool of me?” he demanded, and twirled his moustaches. He was wearing expensive cashmere and an Yves St Laurent necktie; ashore, Jules was always the dandy.

“Jules, I am going to buy lunch for you at La Rotisserie,” Nicholas promised.

“I forgive you,” said Jules, it was one of his favourite eating places – but at that moment Jules became aware that Nicholas was not travelling alone. 

He stood back, took one long look at Samantha and it seemed that tricolors unfurled around him and brass bands burst into the opening bars of La Marseillaise. For if dalliance was the national sport, Jules Levoisin considered himself veteran champion of all France.

He bowed over her hand, and tickled the back of it with his still black mustache. Then he told Nicholas, “She is too good for you, mon petit, I am going to take her away from you.”

“The same way you did
Golden Adventurer
?” Nick asked innocently.

Jules had his ancient Citroen in the car park. It was lovingly waxed and fitted with shiny gewgaws and dangling mascots. He handed Samantha into the front seat as though it was a Rolls Camargue.

“He’s beautiful,” she whispered, as he scampered around to the driver’s door.

Jules could not devote attention to both the road ahead and to Samantha, so he concentrated solely upon her, without deviating from the Citron’s top speed, only occasionally turning to shout, “Cochon!” at another driver or jerk his fist at them with the second finger pointed stiffly upwards in ribald salutation.

“Jules’ 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 opoee 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 mustache.

“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.”

Jules shook his head in admiration, “you Nicholas, 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?”

Chapter 16

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  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 “you eat with a scowl on your face, mon vieux, you will grow yourself ulcers like a bunch of Loire grapes.”