Hungry as the Sea (51 page)

The treacherous channels and passages through the islands were not for a vessel of
Golden Dawn’s
immense bulk, deep draught and limited manoeuvrability. She was to go high above the Tropic of Cancer, and just south of the island of Bermuda she would make her westings and enter the wider and safer waters of the Florida Straits above Grand bahamas. On this course, she would be constricted by narrow and shallow seaways for only a few hundred miles before she was out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico again.

But while she ran on northwards, out of the area of equatorial calm, she should have come out at last into the et cool airs of the trades, but she did not. Day after day, the calm persisted, and stifling still air pressed down on the ship. It did not in any way slow or affect her passage, but her Master remarked to Duncan Alexander: “Another corker today, by the looks of it.” When he received no reply from his brooding, silent Chairman, he retired discreetly, leaving Duncan alone on the open wing of the bridge, with only the breeze of the ship’s passage ruffling his thick coppery hair.

However, the calm was not merely local. It extended westwards in a wide, hot belt across the thousand islands and the basin of shallow sea they enclosed. The calm lay heavily on the oily waters, and the sun beat down on the enclosing land-masses, Every hour the air heated and sucked up the evaporating waters; a fat bubble like a swelling blister began to rise, the first movement of air in many days. It was not a big bubble, only a hundred miles across, but as it rose, the rotation of the earth’s surface began to twist the rising air, spinning it like a top, so that the satellite cameras, hundreds of miles above, recorded a creamy little spiral wisp like the decorative icing flower on a wedding cake.

The cameras relayed the picture through many channels, until at last it reached the desk of the senior forecaster of the hurricane watch at the meteorological headquarters at Miami in southern Florida. “Looks like a ripe one,” he grunted to his assistant, recognizing that all the favourable conditions for the formation of a revolving tropical storm were present. “We’ll ask Airforce for a fly-through.”

At forty-five thousand feet the pilot of the US Airforce B52 saw the rising dome of the storm from two hundred miles away. It had grown enormously in only six hours.

As the warm saturated air was forced upwards, so the icy cold of the upper troposphere condensed the water vapour into thick puffed-up silver clouds. They boiled upwards, roiling and swirling upon themselves. Already the dome of cloud and ferociously turbulent air was higher than the aircraft.

Under it, a partial vacuum was formed, and the surrounding surface air tried to move in to fill it. But it was compelled into an anti-clockwise track around the centre by the mysterious forces of the earth’s rotation. Compelled to travel the long route, the velocity of the air mass accelerated ferociously, and the entire system became more unstable, more dangerous by the hour, turning astern, perpetuating itself by creating greater wind velocities and steeper pressure gradients.

The cloud at the top of the enormous rising dome reached an altitude where the temperature was thirty degrees below freezing and the droplets of rain turned to crystals of ice and were smeared away by upper-level jet-streams. Long beautiful patterns of cirrus against the high blue sky were blown hundreds of miles ahead of the storm to serve as its heralds.

The US Airforce B52 hit the first clear-air turbulence one hundred and fifty miles from the storm’s centre. It was as though an invisible predator had seized the fuselage and shaken it until the wings were almost torn from their roots, and in one surge, the aircraft was flung five thousand feet straight upwards.

“Very severe turbulence,” the pilot reported, “We have vertical wind speeds of three hundred miles an hour plus.”

The senior forecaster in Miami picked up the telephone and called the computer programmer on the floor above him. “Ask Charlie for a hurricane code-name.” And a minute later the programmer called him back. “Charlie says to call the bitch Lorna.”

Six hundred miles south-west of Miami the storm began to move forward, slowly at first but every hour gathering power, spiralling upon itself at unbelievable velocities, its high dome swelling upwards now through fifty thousand feet and still climbing. The centre of the storm opened like a flower, the calm eye extended upwards in a vertical tunnel with smooth walls of solid cloud rising to the very summit of the dome, now sixty thousand feet above the surface of the wind-tortured sea.

The entire mass began to move faster, back towards the east, in a directly contrary direction to the usual track of the gentle trade winds. Spinning and roaring upon itself, devouring everything in its path, the she-devil called Lorna launched itself across the Caribbean sea.

Chapter 43

Nicholas Berg turned his head to look down upon the impressive skyline of Miami Beach. The rampart of tall elegant hotel buildings followed the curve of the beach into the north, and behind it lay the ugly sprawled tangle of urban development and snarled highways.

The Eastern Airlines direct flight from Bermuda turned on to its base leg and then on to final approach, losing height over the beach and Biscayne Bay, Nicholas felt uncomfortable, the nagging of guilt and uncertainty. His guilt was of two kinds. He felt guilty that he had deserted his post at the moment when he was likely to be desperately needed.

Ocean Salvage’s two vessels were out there somewhere in the Atlantic,
Warlock
running hard up the length of the Atlantic in a desperate attempt to catch up with
Golden Dawn
, while Jules Levoisin in Sea Witch was now approaching the eastern seaboard of America where he would refuel before going on to his assignment as standby tug on the exploration field in the Gulf of Mexico. At any moment, the Master of either vessel might urgently need to have his instructions.

Then there was
Golden Dawn
. She had rounded the Cape of Good Hope almost three weeks ago. Since then, even Bernard Wackie had been unable to fix her position. She had not been reported by other craft, and any communications she had made with Christy Main must have been by satellite telex, for she had maintained strict silence on the radio channels. However, she must rapidly be nearing the most critical part of her voyage when she turned west and began her approach to the continental shelf of North America and the passage of the islands into the Gulf. Peter Berg was on board that monster, and Nicholas felt the chill of guilt. His place was at the centre, in the control room of Bach Wackie on the top floor of the bank of Bermuda building in Hamilton Town. His post was there where he could assess changing conditions and issue instant commands to coordinate his salvage tugs.

Now he had deserted his post, and even though he had made arrangements to maintain contact with Bernard Wackie, still it would take him hours, perhaps even days, to get back to where he was needed, if there was an emergency.

But then there was Samantha. His instincts warned him that every day, every hour he delayed in going to her would reduce his chances of having her again.

There was more guilt there, the guilt of betrayal. It was no help to tell himself that he had made no marriage vows to Samantha Silver, that his night of weakness with Chantelle had been forced upon him in circumstances almost impossible to resist, that any other man in his position would have done the same, and that in the end the episode had been a catharsis and a release that had left him free for ever of Chantelle.

To Samantha, it had been betrayal, and he knew that much was destroyed by it. He felt terrible aching guilt, not for the act, for sexual intercourse without love is fleeting and insignificant – but for the betrayal and for the damage he had wrought.

Now he was uncertain, uncertain as to just how much he had destroyed, how much was left for him to build upon. All that he was certain of was that he needed her, more than he had needed anything in his life. She was still the promise of eternal youth and of the new life towards which he was groping so uncertainly. If love was needing, then he loved Samantha Silver with something close to desperation.

She had told him she would not be there when he came. He had to hope now that she had lied, he felt physically sick at the thought that she meant it.

He had only a single Louis Vuitton overnight valise as cabin luggage so he passed swiftly through customs, and as he went into the telephone booths, he checked his watch. It was after six o’clock, she’d be home by now. He had dialled the first four digits of her number before he checked himself.

“What the hell am I phoning for?” he asked himself grimly. “To tell her I’m here, so she can have a flying start when she runs for the bushes?”

There is nothing so doomed as a timid lover. He dropped the receiver back on its cradle, and went for the Hertz desk at the terminal doors. 0”What’s the smallest you’ve got?” he asked.

“A Cougar,” the pretty blonde in the yellow uniform told him. In America, small is a relative term. He was just lucky she hadn’t offered him a Sherman tank.

The brightly painted Chevy van was in the lean-to shelter under the spread branches of the ficus tree, and he parked the Cougar’s nose almost touching its tail-gate. There was no way she could escape now, unless she went out through the far wall of the shed. Knowing her, that was always a possibility, he grinned mirthlessly.

He knocked once on the screen door of the kitchen and went straight in. There was a coffee pot beside the range, and he touched it as he passed. It was still warm.

He went through into the living room, and called “Samantha!” The bedroom door was ajar. He pushed it open. There was a suit of denims, and some pale transparent wisps of underwear thrown carelessly over the patchwork quilt.

The shack was deserted, he went down the steps of the front stoop and straight on to the beach. The tide had swept the sand smooth, and her prints were the only ones. She had dropped her towel above the high-watermark but he had to shade his eyes against the ruddy glare of the lowering sun before he could make out her bobbing head – five hundred yards out.

He sat down beside her towel in the fluffy dry sand and lit a cheroot.

He waited, while the sun settled in a wild, fiery flood of light, and he lost the shape of her head against the darkening sea. She was half a mile out now, but he felt no urgency, and the darkness was almost complete when she rose suddenly, waist-deep from the edge of the gentle surf, waded ashore and came up the beach, twisting the rope of her hair over one shoulder to wring the water from it.

Nicholas felt his heart flop over and he flicked the cheroot away and stood up. She halted abruptly, like a startled forest animal, and stood completely still, staring uncertainly at the tall, dark figure before her. She was so young and slim and smooth and beautiful.

“What do you want?” she faltered.

“You,” he said.

“Why? Are you starting a harem?” Her voice hardened and she straightened; he could not see the expression of her eyes, but her shoulders took on a stubborn set.

He stepped for-ward and she was rigid in his arms and her lips hard and tightly unresponsive under his.

“Sam, there are things I’ll never be able to explain, I don’t even understand them myself, but what I do know very clearly is that I love you, that without you my life is going to be flat and plain goddamned miserable.”

There was no relaxation of the rigid muscles. Her hands were still held stiffly at her sides and her body felt cold and wet and unyielding.

“Samantha, I wish I were perfect – I’m not. But all I am sure of is that I can’t make it without you.”

“I couldn’t take it again. I couldn’t live through this again,” she said tightly.

“I need you. I am certain of that,” he insisted.

“You’d better be, you son of a bitch. You cheat on me one time more and you won’t have anything left to cheat with – I’ll take it off clean, at the roots.” Then she was clinging to him. “Oh God, Nicholas, how I hated you, and how I missed you–- and how long you took to come back,” and her lips were soft and tasted of the sea.

He picked her up and carried her up through the soft sand. He didn’t trust himself to speak, it would be so easy to say the wrong thing now.

Chapter 44

“Nicholas, I’ve been sitting here waiting for your call.“Bernard Wackie’s voice was sharp and alert, the tension barely contained. “How soon can you get yourself back here?”

“What is it?”

“It is starting to pop. I’ve got to hand it to you, baby, you’ve got a nose for it. You smelled this coming.”

“Come on, Bernie!” Nicholas snapped.

“This call is going through three open exchanges,” Bernie told him. “You want chapter and verse, or did nobody ever tell you that it’s a tough game you are in? There is a lot of competition cluttering up the scene. The cheese-heads have one lying handy. Probably Wittezee or one of the other big Dutch tugs. Nicholas thought swiftly. They could be streaming a towing wire within a couple of days, “And the Yanks are pretty hot numbers, McCormick has one stationed in the Hudson River.”

“All right,” Nick cut through the relish with which Bernie was detailing the threat of hovering competition. “There is a direct flight at seven tomorrow morning – if I can’t make that, I’ll connect with the British Airways flight from Nassau at noon tomorrow. Meet me,” Nick ordered.

“You shouldn’t have gone running off,” said Bernard Wackie, showing amazing hindsight. Before he could deliver any more pearls of wisdom, Nicholas hung up on him.

Samantha was sitting up in the centre of the bed. She was stark naked, but she hugged her knees to her chest with both arms, and under the gorgeous tangle of her hair her face was desolate as that of a lost child and her green eyes haunted.

“You’re going again, she said softly. You only just came, and now you’re going again. Oh God, Nicholas, loving you is the toughest job I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t think I have got the muscle for it.” He reached for her quickly and she clung to him, pressing her face into the thick pad of coarse dark hair that covered his chest.