Hungry as the Sea (61 page)

They worked sometimes neck-deep in the bursts of green, frothing water that poured over the ultra-tanker’s fore-dec. They took on board and secured
Warlock’s
main cable, unlocked the hydraulic clamps that held the forward pod tank attached to the hull and, as David Allen eased it clear of the crippled hull, they turned and lumbered back along the twisted and wind-torn catwalk, handicapped by the heavy seaboots and oilskins and the confused seas that still swamped the tank-deck every few minutes.

On the after tank, the whole laborious energy-sapping procedure had to be repeated, but here it was complicated by the chain coupling which connected the two half-mile long pod tanks. Over the walkie-talkie Nicholas had to coordinate the efforts of his seamen to those of David allen at the helm of Warlock.

When at last
Warlock
threw on power to both of her big propellers and sheered away from the wallowing hull, she had both port pod tanks in tow. They floated just level with the surface of the sea, offering no windage for the hurricane winds that would soon be upon them again.

Hanging on to the rail of the raised catwalk Nicholas watched for two precious minutes with an appraising professional eye. It was an incredible sight, two great shiny black whales, their backs showing only in the troughs, and the gallant little ship leading them away. They followed meekly, and Nicholas’ anxiety was lessened. He was not confident, not even satisfied, for there was still a hurricane to navigate – but there was hope now.

“Sea Witch,” he spoke into the small portable radio. “Are you ready to take on tow?” Jules Levoisin fired the rocket-line across personally. Nicholas recognized his portly but nimble-figure high in the fire-control tower, and the rocket left a thin trail of snaking white smoke high against the backdrop of racing, grey hurricane clouds. Arching high over the tanker’s tankdeck, the thin nylon rocket-line fell over the catwalk ten feet from where Nicholas stood.

They worked with a kind of restrained frenzy, and Jules Levoisin brought the big graceful tug in so close beside them that glancing up Nicholas could see the flash of a gold filling in Jules’white smile of encouragement. It was only a glance that Nicholas allowed himself, and then he raised his face and looked at the storm.

The wall of cloud was slippery and smooth and grey, like the body of a gigantic slug, and at its foot trailed a glistening white slimy line where the winds frothed the surface of the sea. It was very close now, ten miles, no more, and above them the sun had gone, cut out by the spiralling vortex of leaden cloud. Yet still that open narrow funnel of clear calm air reached right up to a dark and ominous sky.

There was no hydraulic pressure on the clamps of the starboard forward pod tank. Somewhere in the twisted damaged hull the hydraulic line must have sheared. Nicholas and one of the seamen had to work the emergency release, pumping it open slowly and laboriously by hand.

Still it would not release, the hull was distorted, the clamp jaws out of alignment.

“Pull,” Nicholas commanded Jules in desperation. “Pull all together.” The storm front was five miles away, and already he could hear the deadly whisper of the wind, and a cold puff touched Nicholas uplifted face.

The sea boiled under Sea Witch’s counter, spewing out in a swift white wake as Jules brought in both engines.

The tow-cable came up hard and straight; for half a minute nothing gave, nothing moved – except the wall of racing grey cloud bearing down upon them.

Then, with a resounding metallic clang, the clamps slipped and the tank slid ponderously out of its dock in
Golden Dawn’s
hull – and as it came free, so the hull, held together until that moment by the tank’s bulk and buoyancy, began to collapse.

The catwalk on which Nicholas stood began to twist and tilt so that he had to grab for a handhold, and he stood frozen in horrified fascination as he watched
Golden Dawn
begin the final break-up. The whole tank deck, now only a gutted skeleton, began to bend at its weakened centre, began to hinge like an enormous pair of nutcrackers – and caught between the jaws of the nutcracker was the starboard after pod tank. It was a nut the size of Chartres Cathedral, with a soft liquid centre, and a shell as thin as the span of a man’s hand.

Nicholas broke into a lurching, blundering run down the twisting, tilting catwalk, calling urgently into the radio as he went. “Shear!” he shouted to the seamen almost half a mile away across that undulating plane of tortured steel. “Shear the tandem tow!” For the two starboard pod tanks were linked by the heavy chain of the tandem, and the forward tank was linked to Sea Witch by the main tow-cable. So Sea Witch and the doomed
Golden Dawn
were coupled inexorably, unless they could cut the two tanks apart and let Sea Witch escape with the forward tank which she had just undocked.

The shear control was in the control box halfway back along the tank deck, and at that moment the nearest seaman was two hundred yards from it. Nicholas could see him staggering wildly back along the twisting, juddering catwalk. Clearly he realized the danger, but his haste was fatal, for as he jumped from the catwalk, the deck opened under him, gaping open like the jaws of a steel monster and the seaman fell through, waist deep, into the opening between two moving plates, then as he squirmed feebly, the next lurch of the ship’s hull closed the plates, sliding them across each other like the blades of a pair of scissors.

The man shrieked once and a wave burst over the deck, smothering his mutilated body in cold, green water. when it poured back over the ship s side there was no sign of the man, the deck was washed glisteningly clean.

Nicholas reached the same point in the deck, judged the gaping and closing movement of the steel plate and the next rush of sea coming on board, before he leapt across the deadly gap. He reached the control box, and slid back the hatch, pressing himself into the tiny steel cubicle as he unlocked the red lid that housed the shear button. He hit the button with the heel of his hand.

The four heavy chains of the tandem tow lay between the electrodes of the shear mechanism. With a gross surge of power from the ship’s generators and a flash of blue electric flame, the thick steel links sheared as cleanly as cheese under the cutting wire - and, half a mile away, Sea Witch felt the release and pounded ahead under the full thrust of her propellers taking with her the forward starboard tank still held on main tow.

Nicholas paused in the opening of the control cubicle, hanging on to the sill for support and he stared down at the single remaining tank, still caught inextricably in the tangled moving forest of
Golden Dawn’s
twisting, contorting hull. It was as though an invisible giant had taken the Eiffel Tower at each end and was bending it across his knee.

Suddenly there was a sharp chemical stink in the air, and Nicholas gagged on it. The stink of crude petroleum oil gushing from the ruptured tank.

“Nicholas! Nicholas!” The radio set slung over his shoulder squawked, and he lifted it to his lips without taking his eyes from the
Golden Dawn’s
terrible death throes.

“Go ahead, Jules.”

“Nicholas, I am turning to pick you up.”

“You can’t turn, not with that tow.”

“I will put my bows against the starboard quarterdeck rail, directly under the forward wing of the bridge. Be ready to jump aboard.”

“Jules, you are out of your head!”

“I have been that way for fifty years,” Jules agreed amiably. Be ready.”

“Jules, drop your tow first,” Nicholas pleaded. It would be almost impossible to manoeuvre the Sea Witch with that monstrous dead weight hanging on her tail. “Drop tow. We can pick up again later.”

“You teach your grandfather to break eggs, Jules blithely mangled the old saying, giving it a sinister twist.

“Listen Jules, the No. 4 tank has ruptured. I want you to shut down for fire. Do you understand? Full fire shut down. Once I am aboard, we will put a rocket into her and burn off cargo.”

“I hear you, Nicholas, but I wish I had not.”

Nicholas left the control cubicle, jumped the gaping, chewing gap in the decking and scrambled up the steel ladder on to the central catwalk. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the endlessly slippery grey wall of racing cloud and wind; its menace was overpowering, so that for a moment he faltered before forcing himself into running back along the catwalk towards the tanker’s stern tower half a mile ahead.

The single remaining seaman was on the catwalk a hundred yards ahead of him, pounding determinedly back towards the pick-up point. He also had heard Jules Levoisin’s last transmission.

A quarter of a mile across the roiling, leaping waters, Jules Levoisin was bringing Sea Witch around. At another time Nicholas would have been impressed by the consummate skill with which the little Frenchman was handling his ship and its burdensome tow, but now there was time and energy for one thing only.

The air stank. The heavy fumes of crude oil burned his pumping lungs, and constricted his throat. He coughed and gasped as he ran, the taste and reek of it coated his tongue and seared his nostrils.

Below the catwalk, the bloated pod-tank was punctured in a hundred places by the steel lances of the disintegrating hull, pinched and torn by moving steel girders, and the dark red oil spurted and dribbled and oozed from it like the blood from the carcass of a mortally wounded poisonous dragon.

Nicholas reached the stern tower, barged in through the storm doors to the lowest deck and reached the pump control room.

Duncan Alexander turned to him, as he entered, his face swollen and bruised where Nicholas had beaten him.

“We are abandoning now,” said Nicholas. “Sea Witch is taking us off.”

“I hated you from that very first day,” Duncan was very calm, very controlled, his voice even, deep and cultured. “Did you know that!”

“There’s no time for that now.” Nicholas grabbed his arm, and Duncan followed him readily into the passageway.

“That’s what the game is all about, isn’t it, Nicholas, power and wealth and women – that’s the game we played.” Nicholas was barely listening.

They were out on to the quarter-deck, standing at its starboard rail, below the bridge, the pick-up point that Jules had stipulated. Sea Witch was turning in, only five hundred yards out, and Nicholas had time now to watch Jules handle his ship.

He was running out the heavy tow-cable on free spool, deliberately letting a long bight of it form between the tug and its enormous whalelike burden, and he was using the slack in the cable to cut in towards
Golden Dawn’s
battered, sagging hulk. He would be alongside for the pickup in less than a minute.

“That was the game we played, you and I,” Duncan was still talking calmly. “Power and wealth and women.” Below them
Golden Dawn
poured her substance into the sea in a slick, stinking flood. The waves, battering against her side, churned the oil to a thick filthy emulsion, and it was spreading away across the surface, bleeding its deadly poison into the Gulf Stream to broadcast it to the entire ocean.

“I won, Duncan went on reasonably. I won it all, every time –” He was groping in his pockets, but Nicholas hardly heard him, was not watching him. “– until now.”

Duncan took one of the self-igniting signal flares from his pocket and held it against his chest with both hands, slipping his index finger through the metal ring of the igniter tab. “And yet I win this one also, Nicholas,” he said. “Game, set and match.”

And he pulled the tab on the flare with a sharp jerk, and stepped back, holding it aloft. It spluttered once and then burst into brilliant sparkling red flame, white phosphorescent smoke billowing from it.

Now at last Nicholas turned to face him, and for a moment he was too appalled to move. Then he lunged for Duncan’s raised hand that held the burning flare, but Duncan was too fast for him to reach it.

He whirled and threw the flame in a high spluttering arc, out over the leaking, stinking tank-deck.

It struck the steel tank and bounced once, and then rolled down the canted oil-coated plating.

Nicholas stood paralysed at the rail staring down at it.

He expected a violent explosion, but nothing happened, the flare rolled innocently across the deck, burning with its pretty red twinkling light.

“It’s not burning,” Duncan cried. “Why doesn’t it burn?”

Of course, the gas was only explosive in a confined space, and it needed spark, Out here in the open air the oil had a very high flashpoint, it must be heated to release its volatiles.

The flare caught in the scuppers and fizzled in a black pool of crude, and only then the crude caught. It caught with a red, slow, sulky flame that spread quickly but not explosively over the entire deck, and instantly, thick billows of dark smoke rose in a dense choking cloud.

Below where Nicholas stood, the Sea Witch thrust her bows in and touched them against the tanker’s side. The seaman beside Nicholas jumped and landed neatly on the tug’s bows, then raced back along Sea Witch’s deck.

“Nicholas,” Jules’ voice thundered over the loudhailer. “Jump, Nicholas.”

Nicholas spun back to the rail and poised himself to jump. Duncan caught him from behind, whipping one arm around his throat, and pulling him backwards away from the rail.

“No,” Duncan shouted. “You’re staying my friend. You are not going anywhere. You are staying here with me.”

A greasy wave of black choking smoke engulfed them, and Jules magnified voice roared in Nicholas ears – “Nicholas, I cannot hold her here. jump, quickly, jump.”

Duncan had him off-balance, dragging him backwards, away from the ship’s side, and suddenly Nicholas knew what he must do. Instead of resisting Duncan’s arm, he hurled himself backwards and they crashed together into the superstructure – but Duncan bore the combined weight of both their bodies.

His armlock around the throat relaxed slightly and Nicholas drove his elbow into Duncan’s side below the ribs, then wrenched his body forward from the waist, reached between his own braced legs and caught Duncan’s ankles.