Hungry as the Sea

Hungry as the Sea

By: Wilbur Smith

Synopsis:

"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."

Robbed of his wife and ousted from his huge shipping empire, Nick Berg

is hell-bent on vengeance. It is the sea which gives him his

opportunity. When his arch-rival's luxury liner is trapped in the

tempestuous Antarctic, Nick stakes all to pit his powerful salvage tug

the Warlock in a desperate race against time and the elements.

the novels of Wilbur Smith

The Courtney Novels: When the Lion Feeds

The Sound of Thunder

A Sparrow Falls

The Burning Shore

Power of the Sword

Rage

A Time to Die

The BaUantyne

Novels:

A Falcon Flies

Men of Men

The Angels Weep

The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

The Dark of the Sun

Shout at the Devil

Gold Mine

The Diamond Hunters

The Sunbird Eagle in the sky

givin wor

The Eye of the Tiger

Cry Wolf

Hungry as the Sea

The Wild Justice

Golden Fox

Elephant Song

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at

Michaelhouse and Rhodes University.

He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of

When the Lion Feeds, and has since written twenty-three novels,

meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide.

He normally travels from November to February, often spending a month

skiing in Switzerland, and visiting Australia and New Zealand for sea

fishing. During his summer break, he visits environments as diverse as

Alaska and the dwindling wilderness of the African interior.

He has an abiding concern for the peoples and wildlife of his native

continent, an interest strongly reflected in his novels.

He is married to Danielle, to whom his last nineteen books have been

dedicated.

This book is for my wife Danielle

HUNGRY AS THE SEA

First published in Great Britain 1978 by Mandarin Paperbacks

The an imprint of R6ad International Books Ltd Michelin House, 8i Fulham

Road, London SW3 6RD effec and Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and

Toronto

Reprinted 1992, 1993 (twice), 1994 (twice), 1995 (twice), 1996 (twice)

Copyright 0 Wilbur Smith 1978

catalogue record for this title to d is available from the British

Library

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of

trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated

without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding oi cover

other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition. being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Uk 9 IM718HO1340 429969

Nicholas Berg stepped out of the taxi on to the floodlit dock and paused

to look up at the Warlock. At this state of the tide she rode high

against the stone quay, so that even though the cranes towered above

her, they did not dwarf her.

Despite the exhaustion that fogged his mind and cramped his muscles

until they ached, Nicholas felt a stir of the old pride, the old sense

of value achieved, as he looked at her. She looked like a warship,

sleek and deadly, with the high flared bows and good lines that combined

to make her safe in any seaway.

The superstructure was moulded steel and glittering armoured glass,

behind which her lights burned in carnival array. The wings of her

navigation bridge swept back elegantly and were covered to protect the

men who must work her in the cruellest weather and most murderous seas.

Overlooking the wide stern deck was the second navigation bridge, from

which a skilled seaman could operate the great winches and drums of

Cable, could catch and control the hawser on the hydraulically operated

rising fairleads, could baby a wallowing oil rig or a mortally wounded

liner in a gale or a silky calm.

Against the night sky high above it all, the twin towers replaced the

squat single funnel of the old-fashioned salvage tugs - and the illusion

of a man-of-war was heightened by the fire cannons on the upper

platforms from which the Warlock could throw fifteen hundred tons of sea

water an hour on to a burning vessel. From the towers themselves could

be swung the boarding ladders over which men could be sent aboard a

hulk, and between them was painted the small circular target that marked

the miniature heliport. The whole of it, hull and upper decks, was

fireproofed so she could survive in the inferno of burning petroleum

from a holed tanker or the flaring chemical from a bulk carrier.

Nicholas Berg felt a little of the despondency and spiritual exhaustion

slough away, although his body still ached and his legs carried him

stiffly, like those of an old man, as he started towards the gangplank.

The hell with them all/ he thought. I built her and she is strong and

good. Although it was an hour before midnight, the crew of the Warlock

watched him from every vantage point they could find; even the oilers

had come up from the engine room when the word reached them, and now

loafed unobtrusively on the stern working deck.

David Allen, the First Officer, had placed a hand at the main harbour

gates with a photograph of Nicholas Berg and a five-cent piece for the

telephone call box beside the gate, and the whole ship was alerted now.

David Allen stood with the Chief Engineer in the glassed wing of the

main navigation bridge and they watched the solitary figure pick his way

across the shadowy dock, carrying his own case.

So that's him/ David's voice was husky with awe and respect. He looked

like a schoolboy under his shaggy bush of sun-bleached hair.

He's a bloody film star, Vinny Baker, the Chief Engineer, hitched up his

sagging trousers with both elbows, and his spectacles slid down the long

thin nose, as he snorted.

A bloody film star/ he repeated the term with utmost scorn.

He was first to Jules Levoisin/ David pointed out, and in the note of

awe as he intoned that name, and he is a tug man from way back. 'That

was fifteen years ago. Vinny Baker released his elbow grip on his

trousers and pushed his spectacles up on to the bridge of his nose.

Immediately his trousers began their slow but inexorable slide

deckwards. Since then he's become a bloody glamour boy - and an owner.

Yes, David Allen agreed, and his baby face crumpled a little at the

thought of those two legendary animals, master and owner, combined in

one monster. A monster man which was on the point of mounting his

gangway to the deck of Warlock.

You'd better go down and kiss him on the soft spot/ vinny grunted

comfortably, and drifted away. Two decks down was the sanctuary of his

control room where neither masters nor owners could touch him. He was

going there now.

David Allen was breathless and flushed when he reached the entry port.

The new Master was halfway up the gangway, and he lifted his head and

looked steadily at the mate as he stepped aboard.

Though he was only a little above average, Nicholas Berg gave the

impression of towering height, and the shoulders beneath the blue

cashmere of his jacket were wide and powerful. He wore no hat and his

hair was very dark, very thick and brushed back from a wide unlined

forehead. The head was big-nosed and punt-boned, with a heavy jaw, blue

now with new beard, and the eyes were set deep in the cages of their

bony sockets, underlined with dark plumcoloured smears, as though they

were bruised.

But what shocked David Allen was the man's pallor. His face was

drained, as though he had been bled from the jugular. it was the pallor

of mortal illness or of exhaustion close to death itself, and it was

emphasized by the dark eye-sockets. This was not what David had

expected of the legendary Golden Prince of Christy Marine. It was not

the face he had seen so often pictured in newspapers and magazines

around the world. Surprise made him mute and the man stopped and looked

down at him.

Allen? asked Nicholas Berg quietly. His voice was low and level,

without accent, but with a surprising timbre and resonance.

Yes, sir. Welcome aboard, sir. When Nicholas Berg smiled, the edges of

sickness and exhaustion smoothed away at his brow and at the corners of

his mouth. His hand was smooth and cool, but his grip was firm enough

to make David blink.

I'll show you your quarters, sir. David took the Louis Vuitton suitcase

from his grip.

I know the way, said Nick Berg. I designed her.

He stood in the centre of the Master's day cabin, and felt the deck tilt

under his feet, although the Warlock was fast to the stone dock, and the

muscles in his thighs trembled.

The funeral went off all right? Nick asked.

He was cremated, sir/ David said. That's the way he wanted it.

I have made the arrangements for the ashes to be sent home to Mary.

Mary is his wife, sir/ he explained quickly.

Yes/ said Nick Berg. I know. I saw her before I left London.

Mac and I were ship-mates once. He told me. He used to boast about

that. Have you cleared all his gear? Nick asked, and glanced around

the Master's suite.

Yes sir, we've packed it all up. There is nothing of his left in here.

He was a good man! Nick swayed again on his feet and looked longingly

at the day couch, but instead he crossed to the port and looked out on

to the dock. How did it happen? my report Tell me!

said Nicholas Berg, and his voice cracked like a whip.

The main tow-cable parted, sir. He was on the afterdeck.

it took his head off like a bullwhip. Nick stood quietly for a moment,

thinking about that description of tragedy. He had seen a tow part

under stress once before.

That time it had.and killed three men.

, Nick hesitated a moment, the exhaustion had slowed and softened him so

that for a moment he was on the point of explaining why he had come to

take command of Warlock himself, rather than sending another hired man

to replace Mac.

It might help to have somebody to talk to now, when he was right down on

his knees, beaten and broken and tired to the very depths of his soul.

He swayed again, then caught himself and forced aside the temptation. He

had never whined for sympathy in his life before.

All right,, he repeated. Please give my apologies to your officers. I

have not had much sleep in the last two weeks, and the flight out from

Heathrow was murder, as always.

I'll meet them in the morning. Ask the cook to send a tray with my

dinner. The cook was a huge man who moved like a dancer in a snowy

apron and a theatrical chef's cap. Nick Berg stared at him as he placed

the tray on the table at his elbow. The cook wore his hair in a shiny

carefully coiffured bob that fell to his right shoulder, but was drawn

back from the left, cheek to display a small diamond earring in the

pierced lobe of that ear.

He lifted the cloth off the tray with a hand as hairy as that of a bull

gorilla, but his voice was as lyrical as a girl's, and his eyelashes

curled soft and dark on to his cheek.

bowl of soup, and a pot-all-feu. It's one of my little special things.

You will adore it/ he said, and stepped back.

He surveyed Nick Berg with those huge hands on his hips. But I took one

look at you as you came aboard and I just knew what you really needed.

With a magician's flourish, he produced a half-bottle of Pinch Haig from

the deep pocket of his apron. Take a nip of that with your dinner, and

then straight into bed with you, you poor dear., No man had ever called

Nicholas Berg dear before, but his tongue was too thick and slow for the

retort. He stared after the cook as he disappeared with a sweep of his

white apron and the twinkle of the diamond, and then he grinned weakly

and shook his head, weighing the bottle in his hand.

Damned if I don't need it/ he muttered, and went to find a glass.

He poured it half full, and sipped as he came back to the couch and

lifted the lid of the soup pot. The steaming aroma made the little

saliva glands under his tongue spurt.

The hot food and whisky in his belly taxed his last reserves, and

Nicholas Berg kicked off his shoes as he staggered into his night cabin.

He awoke with the -anger on him. He had not been angry in two weeks

which was a measure of his despondency.

But when he shaved, the mirrored face was that of a stranger still, too

pale and punt and set. The lines that framed his mouth were too deeply

chiselled, and the early sunlight through the port caught the dark hair

at his temple and he saw the frosty glitter there and leaned closer to

the mirror. It was the first time he had noticed the flash of silver

hair - perhaps he had never looked hard enough, or perhaps it was

something new.

Forty he thought. I'll be forty years old next June. He had always

believed that if a man never caught the big one before he was forty, he

was doomed never to do so.

So what were the rules for the man who caught the big wave before he was

thirty, and rode it fast and hard and high, then lost it again before he

was forty and was washed out into the trough of boiling white water. Was

he doomed also?

Nick stared at himself in the mirror and felt the anger in him change

its form, becoming directed and functional.

He stepped into the shower, and let the needles of hot water sting his

chest. Through the tiredness and disillusion, he was aware, for the

first time in weeks, of the underlying strength which he had begun to

doubt was still there. He felt it rising to the surface in him, and he

thought of what an extraordinary sea creature he was, how it needed only

a deck under him and the smell of the sea in his throat.

He stepped from the shower and dried quickly. This was the right place

to be now. This was the place to recuperate - and he realized that his

decision not to replace Mac with a hired skipper had been a gut

decision. He needed to be here himself.

Always he had known that if you wanted to ride the big wave, you must

first be at the place where it begins to peak. It's an instinctive

thing, a man just knows where that place is. Nick Berg knew deep in his

being that this was, the place now, and, with his rising strength, he

felt the old excitement, the old I'll show the bastards who is beaten,

excitement, and he dressed swiftly and went up the Master's private

companionway to the Upper deck.

immediately, the wind flew at him and flicked his dark wet hair into his

face. It was force five from the south-east, and it came boiling over

the great flat-topped mountain which crouched above the city and

harbour. Nick looked at it and saw the thick white cloud they called

the table cloth spilling off the heights, and swirling along the grey

rock cliffs.

The Cape of Storms/ he murmured. Even the water in the protected dock

leaped and peaked into white crests which blew away like wisps of smoke.

The tip of Africa thrust southwards into one of the most treacherous

seas on all the globe. Here two oceans swept turbulently together off

the rocky cliffs of Cape Point, and then rolled over the shallows of the

Agulhas bank.

Here wind opposed current in eternal conflict. This was the breeding

ground of the freak wave, the one that mariners called the hundred-year

wave,, because statistically that was how often it should occur.

But off the Agulhas bank, it was always lurking, waiting only for the

right combination of wind and current, waiting for the inphase wave

sequence to send its crest rearing a hundred feet, high and steep as

those grey rock cliffs of Table Mountain itself.

Nick had read the accounts of seamen who had survived that wave, and, at

a loss for words, they had written only of a great hole in the sea into

which a ship fell helplessly.

When the hole closed, the force of breaking water would bury her

completely. Perhaps the Waratah Castle was one which had fallen into

that trough. Nobody would ever know. - a great ship of 9,000 tons

burden, she and her crew of 211 had disappeared without trace in these

seas.

Yet here was one of the busiest sea lanes on the globe, as a procession

of giant tankers ploughed ponderously around that rocky Cape on their

endless shuttle between the Western. world and the oil Gulf of Persia,

Despite their bulk, those supertankers were perhaps some of the most

vulnerable vehicles yet designed by man.

Now Nick turned and looked across the wind-ripped waters of Duncan Dock

at one of them. He could read her name on the stern that rose like a

five-storied apartment block. She was owned by Shell Oil, 250,000 dead

weight tons, and, out of ballast, she showed much of her rust-red

bottom. She was in for repairs, while out in the roadstead of Table

Bay, two other monsters waited patiently for their turn in the hospital

dock.

So big and ponderous and vulnerable - and valuable.

Nick licked his lips involuntarily - hull and cargo together, she was

thirty million dollars, piled up like a mountain.

That was why he had stationed the Warlock here at Cape Town on the

southernmost tip of Africa. He felt the strength and excitement surging

upwards in him.

All right, so he had lost his wave. He was no longer cresting and

racing. He was down and smothered in white water. But he could feel

his head breaking the surface, and he was still on the break-line. He

knew there was another big wave racing down on him. It was just

beginning to peak and he knew he still had the strength to catch her, to

get high and race again.

I did it once - I'll damned well do it again/he said aloud, and went

down for breakfast.

He stepped into the saloon, and for a long moment nobody realized he was

there. There was an excited buzz of comment and speculation that

absorbed them all.

The Chief Engineer had an old copy of Lloyd's List folded at the front

page and held above a plate of eggs as he read aloud. Nicholas wondered

where he had found the ancient copy.

His spectacles had slid right to the end of his nose, so he had to tilt

his head far backwards to see through them, and his Australian accent

twanged like a guitar.

In a joint statement issued by the new Chairman and incoming members of

the Board, a tribute was paid to the fifteen years of loyal service that

Mr. Nicholas Berg had given to Christy Marine. The five officers

listened avidly, ignoring their breakfasts, until David Allen glanced up

at the figure in the doorway.

captain, Sir, he shouted, and leapt to his feet, while with the other

hand, he snatched the newspaper out of Vinny Baker's hands and bundled

it under the table.

Sir, may I present the officers of Warlock. Shuffling, embarrassed, the

younger officers shook hands hurriedly and then applied themselves

silently to their congealing breakfasts with a total dedication that

precluded any conversation, while Nick Berg took the Master's seat at

the head of the long table in the heavy silence and David Allen sat down

again on the crumpled sheets of newsprint.

The steward offered the menu to the new Captain, and returned almost

immediately with a dish of stewed fruit.

I ordered a boiled egg/ said Nick mildly, and an apparition in snowy

white appeared from the galley, with the chef's cap at a jaunty angle.

"The sailor's curse is constipation, Skipper. I look after MY officers

- that fruit is delicious and good for you. I'm doing you your eggs

now, dear, but eat your fruit first. And the diamond twinkled again as

he vanished.

Nick stared after him in the appalled silence.

Fantastic cook/ blurted David Allen, his fair skin flushed pinkly and

the Lloyd's List rustled under his backside. Could get a job on any

passenger liner, could Angel. If he ever left the Warlock, half the

crew would go with him/ growled the Chief Engineer darkly, and hauled at

his pants with elbows below the level of the table. And I'd be one of

them., Nick Berg turned his head politely to follow the conversation.

He's almost a doctor, David Allen went on, addressing the Chief

Engineer.

Five years at Edinburgh Medical School/ agreed the Chief solemnly.

Do you remember how he set the seconds leg? Terribly useful to have a

doctor aboard.

Nick picked up his spoon, and tentatively lifted a little of the fruit

to his mouth. Every officer watched him intently as he chewed.

Nick took another spoonful.

You should taste his jams, said David Allen addressing Nick directly at

last. Absolutely Cordon Bleu stuff. Thank you, gentlemen, for the

advice/ said Nick. The smile did not touch his mouth, but crinkled his

eyes slightly. But would somebody convey a private message to Angel

that if he ever calls me "dear" again I'll beat that ridiculous cap down

about his ears. In the relieved laughter that followed, Nick turned to

David Allen and sent colour flying to his cheeks again by asking, You

seem to have finished with that old copy Of the List, Number One. Do

you mind if I glance at it again? Reluctantly, David lifted himself and

produced the newspaper, and there was another tense silence as Nick Berg

rearranged the rumpled sheets and studied the old headlines without any

apparent emotion.

THE GOLDEN PRINCE OF CHRISTY MARINE DEPOSED

Nicholas hated that name, it had been old Arthur Christy's quirk to name

all of his vessels with the prefix Golden, and twelve years ago, when

Nick had rocketed to head of operations at ChristY Marine, some wag had

stuck that label on him.

ALEXANDER TO HEAD THE CHRISTY BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Nicholas was surprised by the force of his hatred for the Man.

They had fought like a pair of bulls for dominance of the herd and the

tactics that Duncan Alexander had used had won. Arthur Christy had said

once, Nobody gives a damn these days whether it is moral or fair, all

that counts is, will it work and can you get away with it? For Duncan it

had worked, and he had got away with it in the grandest possible style.

As Managing-Director in charge of operations, Mr. Nicholas Berg helped

to build Christy Marine from a small coasting and salvage company into

one of the five largest owners of cargo shipping operating anywhere in

the world.

After the death of Arthur Christy in 1968, Mr. Nicholas Berg succeeded

him as Chairman, and continued the company's spectacular expansion.

At present, Christy Marine has in commission eleven bulk carriers and

tankers in excess of 250,000 dead weight tons, and has building the

1,000,000 ton giant ultra-tanker Golden Dawn. it will be the largest

vessel ever launched.

There it was, stated in the boldest possible terms, the labour of a

man's lifetime. Over a billion dollars of shipping, designed, financed

and built almost entirely with the energy and enthusiasm and faith of

Nicholas Berg.

Mr. Nicholas Berg married Miss Chantelle Christy, the only child of Mr.

Arthur Christy. However, the marriage ended in divorce in September of

last year and the former Mrs. Berg has subsequently married Mr. Duncan

Alexander, the new Chairman of Christy Marine.

He felt the hollow nauseous feeling in his stomach and in his head the

vivid image of the woman. He not want to think of her now, but could

not thrust the image aside. she was bright and beautiful as a flame -

and, like a flame, you could not hold her. when she went, she took

everything with her, everything. He should hate her also, he really

should. Everything, he thought the company, his life's work, and the

child. When he thought of the child, he nearly succeeded in hating her,

and the newsprint shook in his hand.

He became aware again that five men were watching him, and without

surprise he realized that not a flicker of his emotions had shown on his

face. To be a player for fifteen years in one of the world's highest

games of chance, inscrutability was a minimum requirement.

In a joint statement issued by the new Chairman and incoming members of

the Board, a tribute was paid.

Duncan Alexander paid the tribute for one reason, Nick thought grimly.

He wanted the 100,000 Christy Marine shares that Nick owned.

Those shares were very far from a controlling interest. Chantelle had a

million shares in her own name, and there were another million in the

Christy Trust, but insignificant as it was, Nick's holding gave him a

voice in and an entry to the company's affairs.

Nick had bought and paid for every one of those shares.

Nobody had given him a thing, not once in his life. He had taken

advantage of every stock option in his contract, had bartered bonus and

salary for those options, and now those 100,00 shares were worth three

million dollars, meagre reward for the labour which had built up a

fortune of sixty million dollars for the Christy father and daughter.

It had taken Duncan Alexander almost a year to get those shares.

He and Nicholas had bargained with cold loathing. They had hated each

other from the first day that Duncan had walked into the Christy

building on Leadenhall Street. He had come as old Arthur Christy's

latest Wunderkind. The financial genius fresh from his triumphs as

financial controller of International Electronics, and the hatred had

been instant and deep and mutual, a fierce smouldering chemical reaction

between them.

In the end Duncan Alexander had won, he had won it all, except the

shares, and he had bargained for those from overwhelming strength. He

had bargained with patience and skill, wearing his man down over the

months. Using all Christy Marine's reserves to block and frustrate

Nicholas, forcing him back step by step, taxing even his strength to its

limits, driving such a bargain that at the end Nicholas was forced to

bow and accept a dangerous price for his shares. He had taken as full

payment the subsidiary of Christy Marine, Christy Towage and Salvage,

all its assets and all its debts. Nick had felt like a fighter who had

been battered for fifteen rounds, and was now hanging desperately to the

ropes with his legs gone, blinded by his own sweat and blood and swollen

flesh, so he could not see from whence the next punch would come. But

he had held on just long enough. He had got Christy Towage and Salvage

- he had walked away with something that was completely and entirely

his.

Nicholas Berg lowered the newspaper, and immediately his officers

attacked their breakfasts ravenously and there was the clatter of

cutlery.

There is an officer missing/he said.

It's only the Trog, sir/Dave Allen explained.

The Trog?

The Radio Officer, sir. Speirs, sir. We call him the Troglodyte.

I'd like all the officers present.

He never comes out of his cave/Vinny Baker explained helpfully, All

right/ Nick nodded. I will speak to him later.

They waited now, five eager young men, even Vin Baker he could not

completely hide his interest behind the smeared lenses of his spectacles

and the tough Aussie veneer.

I wanted to explain to you the new set-up. The Chief has kindly read to

you this article, presumably for the benefit of those who were unable to

do so for themselves a year ago.

Nobody said anything, but Vin Baker fiddled with his porridge spoon.

So you are aware that I am no longer connected in any way with Christy

Marine. I have now acquired Christy Towage and Salvage. It becomes a

completely independent company. The name is being changed. Nicholas

had resisted the vanity of calling it Berg Towage and Salvage.

It will be known as Ocean Towage and Salvage.

He had paid dearly for it, perhaps too dearly. He had given up his

three million dollars worth of Christy shares for God alone knew what.

But he had been tired unto death.

We own two vessels. The Golden Warlock and her sister ship which is

almost ready for her sea trials, the Golden Witch.

He knew exactly how much the company owed on those two ships, he had

agonized over the figures through long and sleepless nights. On paper

the net worth of the company was around four million dollars; he had

made a paper profit of a million dollars on his bargain with Duncan

Alexander. But it was paper profit only, the company had debts of

nearly four million more. If he missed just one month's interest

payments on those debts - he dismissed the thought quickly, for on a

forced sale his residue in the company would be worth nothing. He would

be completely wiped out.

The names of both ships have been changed also. They will become simply

Warlock and Sea Witch. From now onwards "Golden" is a dirty word around

Ocean Salvage. They laughed then, a release of tension, and Nick smiled

with them, and lit a thin black cheroot from the crocodileskin case

while they settled down.

I will be running this ship until Sea Witch is commissioned. It won't be

long, and there will be promotions then.

Nick superstitiously tapped the mahogany mess table as he said it. The

dockyard strike had been simmering for a long time. Sea Witch was still

on the ways, but costing interest, and further delay would prove him

mortal.

I have got a long oil-rig tow. Bight of Australia to South America. It

will give us all time to shake the ship down.

You are all tug men, I don't have to tell you when the big one comes up,

there will be no warning.

They stirred, and the eagerness was on them again. Even the oblique

reference to prize money had roused them.

Chief? Nick looked across at him, and the Engineer snorted, as though

the question was an insult.

In all respects ready for sea/ he said, and tried simultaneously to

adjust his trousers and his spectacles.

Number One? Nick looked at David Allen. He had not yet become

accustomed to the Mate's boyishness. He knew that he had held a master

mariner's ticket for ten years, that he was over thirty years of age and

that MacDonald had hand-picked him - he had to be good. Yet that fair

unlined face and quick high colour under the unruly mop of blond hair

made him look like an undergraduate.

I'm waiting on some stores yet, sir/ David answered quickly. The

chandlers have promised for today, but none of it is vital. I could

sail in an hour, if it is necessary.

All right. Nick stood up. I will inspect the ship at 0900 hours. You'd

best get the ladies off the ship. During the meal there had been the

faint tinkle of female voices and laughter from the crew's quarters.

Nick stepped out of the saloon and Vin Baker's voice was pitched to

reach him. It was a truly dreadful imitation of what the Chief believed

to be a Royal Naval accent.

logoo, chaps. Jolly good show, what?

Nick did not miss a step, and he grinned tightly to himself. It's an

old Aussie custom; you needle and needle until something happens. There

is no malice in it, it's just a way of getting to know your man. And

once the boots and fists have stopped flying, you can be friends or

enemies on a permanent basis. It was so long since he had been in

elemental contact with tough physical men, straight hard men who shunned

all subterfuge and sham, and he found the novelty stimulating. Perhaps

that was what he really needed now, the sea and the company of real men.

He felt his step quicken and the anticipation of physical confrontation

lift his spirits off the bottom.

He went up the companionway to the navigation deck, taking the steps

three at a time, and the doorway opposite his suite opened. From it

emerge the solid grey stench of cheap Dutch cigars and a head that could

have belonged to some prehistoric reptile. It too was pale grey and

lined and wrinkled, the head of a sea-turtle or an iguana lizard, with

the same small dark glittery eyes.

The door was that of the radio room. It had direct access to the main

navigation bridge and was merely two paces from the Master's day cabin.

Despite appearances, the head was human, and Nick recalled clearly how

Mac had once described his radio officer. He is the most anti-social

bastard I've ever sailed with, but he can scan eight different

frequencies simultaneously, in clear and morse, even while he is asleep.

He is a mean, joyless, constipated son of a bitch - and probably the

best radio man afloat.

Captain/ said the Trog, in a reedy petulant voice. Nick did not ponder

the fact that the Trog recognized him instantly as the new Master. The

air of command on some men is unmistakable. Captain, I have an "all

ships signify .

Nick felt the heat at the base of his spine, and the electric prickle on

the back of his neck. It is not sufficient merely to be on the break

line when the big wave peaks, it is also necessary to recognize your

wave from the hundred others that sweep by.

Coordinates? he snapped, as he strode down the passageway to the radio

room.

1 7 2 1 6 south 3 2 1 2 west.

Nick felt the jump in his chest and the heat mount up along his spine,

The high latitudes down there in the vast nd lonely wastes. There was

something sinister and menacing in the mere figures. What ship could be

down there?

The longitudinal coordinates fitted neatly in the chart that Nick

carried in his mind, like a war chart in a military operations room. She

was south and west of the Cape of Good Hope - down deep, beyond Gough

and Bouvet Island, in the Weddell Sea.

He followed the Trog into the radio room. On this bright, sunny and

windy morning, the room was dark and gloomy as a cave, the thick green

blinds drawn across the ports; the only source of light was the glowing

dials of the banked communication equipment, the most sophisticated

equipment that all the wealth of Christy Marine could pack into her, a

hundred thousand dollars'worth of electronic magic, but the stink of

cheap cigars was overpowering.

Beyond the radio room was the operator's cabin, the bunk unmade, a tray

of soiled dishes on the deck beside it.

The Trog hopped up into the swivel seat, and elbowed aside a brass

shell-casing that acted as an ashtray and spilled grey flakes of ash and

a couple of cold wet -chewed cigar butts on to the desk.

Like a wizened gnome, the Trog tended his dials; there as a cacophony of

static and electronic trash blurred with the sharp howl of morse.

The copy? Nick asked, and the Trog pushed a pad at him. Nick read off

quickly.

CTM.Z. 0603 GMT. 72 16 S. 320 12 W. All ships in a position to

render assistance, please signify. CTM.Z.

He did not need to consult the R. T. Handbook to recognize that

call-sign CTMZ'

With an effort of will he controlled the pressure that caught him in the

chest like a giant fist. It was as though he had lived this moment

before. It was too neat. He forced himself to distrust his instinct,

forced himself to think with his head and not his guts.

Beyond him he heard his officers voices on the navigation bridge, quiet

voices - but charged with tension.

They were up from the saloon already.

Christ! he thought savagely. How do they know? So quickly? It was as

though the ship itself had come awake beneath his feet and trembled with

anticipation.

The door from the bridge slid aside and David Allen stood in the opening

with a copy of Lloyd's Register in his hands.

CTMZ, sir, is the call sign of the Golden Adventurer.

Twenty-two thousand tons, registered Bermuda 1975.

Owners Christy Marine.

Thank you, Number One, Nick nodded. Nicholas knew her well; he

personally had ordered her construction before the collapse of the great

liner traffic. Nick had planned to use her on the Europe-to-Australia

run.

Her finished cost had come in at sixty-two million dollars, and she was

a beautiful and graceful ship under her tall light alloy superstructure.

Her accommodation was luxurious, in the same class as the France or the

United States, but she had been one of Nick's few miscalculations.

When the feasability of operation on the planned run had shown up

prohibitive in the face of rising costs and diminishing trade, Nick had

switched her usage. It was this type of flexible and intuitive planning

and improvisation that had built Christy Marine into the goliath she was

now.

Nick had innovated the idea of adventure cruises - and changed the

ship's name to Golden Adventurer. Now she carried rich passengers to

the wild and exotic corners of the globe, from the Galapagos Islands to

the Amazon, from the remote Pacific islands to the Antarctic, in search

of the unusual.

She carried guest lecturers with her, experts on the environments and

ecology of the areas she was to visit, and she was equipped to take her

passengers ashore to study the monoliths of Easter Island or to watch

the mating displays of the wandering albatross on the Falkland Islands.

She was probably one of the very few cruise liners that was still

profitable, and now she stood in need of assistance.

Nicholas turned back from the Trog. Has she been transmitting prior to

this signify request?

She's been sending in company code since midnight.

Her traffic was so heavy that I was watching her.

The green glow of the sets gave the little man a bilious cast, and made

his teeth black, so that he looked like an actor from a horror movie.

You recorded? Nick demanded, and the Trog switched on the automatic

playback of his tape monitors, recapitulating every message the

distressed ship had sent or received since the previous midnight. The

jumbled blocks of code poured into the room, and the paper strip printed

out with the clatter of its keys.

Had Duncan. Alexander changed the Christy Marine code? Nick wondered.

It would be the natural procedure, completely logical to any operations

man. You lose a man who has the code, you change immediately. It was

that simple. Duncan had lost Nick Berg, he should change. But Duncan

was not an operations man. He was a figures and paper man, he thought

in numbers, not in steel and salt water.

If Duncan had changed, they would never break it. Not even with the

Decca. Nick had devised the basis of the code. It was a projection

that expressed the alphabet as a mathematical function based on a random

six-figure master, changing the value of each letter on a progression

that was impossible to monitor.

Nick hurried out of the stinking gloom of the radio room with the

print-out in his hands.

The navigation bridge of Warlock was gleaming chrome and glass, as

bright and functional as a modern surgical theatre, or a futuristic

kitchen layout.

The primary control console stretched the full width of the bridge,

beneath the huge armoured windows. The oldfashioned wheel was replaced

by a single steel lever, and the remote control could be carried out on

to the wings of the bridge on its long extension cable, like the remote

on a television set, so that the helmsman could con the ship from any

position he chose.

Illuminated digital displays informed the master instantly of every

condition of his ship: speed across the bottom at bows and stern, speed

through the water at bows and stern, wind direction and strength,

together with all the other technical information of function and

mulffunction. Nick had built the ship with Christy money, and stinted

not at all.

The rear of the bridge was the navigational area, and the chart-table

divided it neatly with its overhead racks containing the 106 big blue

volumes of the Global Pilot and as many other volumes of maritime

publications.

Below the table were the multiple drawers, wide and flat to contain the

spread Admiralty charts that covered every corner of navigable water on

the globe.

Against the rear bulkhead stood the battery of electronic navigational

aids, like a row of fruit machines in a Vegas gambling hall.

Nick switched the big Decca Satellite Navaid into its computer mode and

the display lights flashed and faded and relit in scarlet.

He fed it the six-figure control, numbers governed by the moon phase and

date of dispatch. The computer digested this instantaneously, and Nick

gave it the last arithmetical proportion known to him. The Decca was

ready to decode and Nick gave it the block of garbled transmission - and

waited for it to throw back gibberish at him. Duncan must have altered

the code. He stared at the printout.

Christy Marine from Master of Adventurer. 2216 GMT.

72 16 S. 32 05 W. Underwater ice damage sustained Midships starboard.

Precautionary shutdown mains.

Auxiliary generators activated during damage survey.

Stand by.

So Duncan had let the code stand then. Nick groped for the croc-skin

case of cheroots, and his hand was steady and firm as he held the flame

to the top of the thin black tube.

He felt the intense desire to shout aloud, but instead, he drew the

fragrant smoke into his lungs.

Plotted/ said David Allen from behind him. Already on the spread chart

of the Antarctic he had marked in the reported position. The

transformation was complete, the First Officer had become a grimly

competent professional.

There remained no trace of the high-coloured undergraduate.

Nick glanced at the plot, saw the dotted ice line far above the

Adventurer's position, saw the outline of the forbidding continent of

Antarctica groping for the ship with merciless fingers of ice and rock.

The Decca printed out the reply:

Master of Adventurer from Christy Marine. 22.22 GMT.

Standing by.

The next message from the recording tape was flagged nearly two hours

later, but was printed out almost continuously from the Trog's

recording.

Christy Marine from Master of Adventurer. 0005 GMT.

72 18 S - 32 05 W. Water contained. Restarted mains.

New course CAPE TOWN direct. Speed 8 knots. Stand by.

Dave Allen worked swiftly with parallel rulers and protractor.

While she was without power she drifted thirty-four nautical miles,

south-southeast - there is a hell of a wind or big current setting down

there/ he said, and the other deck officers were silent and strained.

Although none of them would dare crowd the Master at the Decca, yet in

order of seniority they had taken up vantage points around the bridge

best suited to follow the drama of a great ship in distress.

The next message ran straight out from the computer, despite the fact

that it had been dispatched many hours later.

Christy Marine from Master of Adventurer. 0546 GMT.

72 16 S. 32 12 W. Explosion in flooded area. Emergency shutdown all.

Water gaining. Request your clearance to issue all ships signify.

Standing by.

Master of Adventurer from Christy Marine. 0547 GMT.

You are cleared to issue signify. Break. Break. Break.

You are expressly forbidden to contract tow or salvage without reference

Christy Marine. Acknowledge.

Duncan was not even putting in the old chestnut, except in the event of

danger to human life.

The reason was too apparent. Christy Marine underwrote most of its own

bottoms through another of its subsidiaries. The London and European

Insurance and Finance Company, The self-insurance scheme had been the

brain-child of Alexander Duncan himself when first he arrived at Christy

Marine. Nick Berg had opposed the scheme bitterly, and now he might

live to see his reasoning being justified.

Are we going to signify? David Allen asked quietly.

Radio silence/snapped Nick irritably, and began to pace the bridge, the

crack of his heels muted by the cork coating on the deck.

Is this my wave? Nick demanded of himself, applying the old rule he had

set for himself long ago, the rule of deliberate thought first, action

after.

The Golden Adventurer was drifting in the ice-fields two thousand and

more miles south of Cape Town, five days and nights of hard running for

the Warlock. If he made the go decision, by the time he reached her,

she might have effected repairs and restarted, she might be under her

own command again. Again, even if she was still helpless, Warlock might

reach her to find another salvage tug had beaten her to the scene. So

now it was time to call the roll.

He stopped his pacing at the door to the radio room and spoke quietly to

the Trog.

Open the telex line and send to Bach Wackie in Bermuda quote call the

roll unquote.

As he turned away, Nick was satisfied with his own forethought in

installing the satellite telex system which enabled him to communicate

with his agent in Bermuda, or with any other selected telex station,

without his message being broadcast over the open frequencies and

monitored by a competitor or any other interested party.

His signals were bounced through the high stratosphere where they could

not be intercepted.

While he waited, Nicholas worried. The decision to go would mean

abandoning the Esso oil-rig tow. The tow fee had been a vital

consideration in his cash flow situation.

Two hundred and twenty thousand sterling, without which he could not

meet the quarterly interest payment due in sixty days time - unless,

unless ... He juggled figures in his head, but the magnitude of the

risk involved was growing momentarily more apparent - and the figures

did not add up. He needed the Esso tow. God, how badly he neededit!

Bach Wackie are replying/ called the Trog above the chatter of the telex

receiver, and Nick spun on his heel.

He had appointed Bach Wackie as the agents for Ocean Salvage because of

their proven record of quick and aggressive efficiency. He glanced at

his Rolex Oyster and calculated that it was about two o'clock in the

morning local time in Bermuda, and yet his request for information on

the disposition of all his major competitors was now being answered

within minutes of receipt.

For Master Warlock from Bach Wackie latest reported positions. fohn

Ross dry dock Durban. Woltema Wolteraad Esso tow Torres Straits to

Alaska Shelf That took care of the two giant Safmarine tugs; half of the

top opposition was out of the race.

Wittezee Shell exploration tow Galveston to North Sea.

Grootezee lying Brest That was the two Dutchmen out of it. The names

and positions of the other big salvage tugs, each of them a direct and

dire threat to Warlock, ran swiftly from the telex and Nicholas chewed

his cheroot ragged as he watched, his eyes slitted against the

spiralling blue smoke, feeling the relief rise in him as each report put

another of his competitors in some distant waters, far beyond range of

the stricken ship.

La Mouette/ Nick's hands balled into fists as the name sprang on to the

white paper sheet, La Mouette discharged Brazgas tow Golfo San Jorge on

I4th reported enroute Buenos Aires.

Nick grunted like a boxer taking a low blow, and turned away from the

machine. He walked out on to the open wing of the bridge and the wind

tore at his hair and clothing.

La Mouette, the sea-gull, a fanciful name for that black squat hull, the

old-fashioned high box of superstructure, the traditional single stack;

Nick could see it clearly when he closed his eyes.

There was no doubt in his mind at all. Jules Levoisin was already

running hard for the south, running like a hunting dog with the scent

hot in its nostrils.

Jules had discharged in the southern Atlantic three days ago. He would

certainly have hunkered at Cornodoro. Nick knew how Jules mind worked,

he was never happy unless his bunkers were bulging.

Nick flicked the stub of his cigar away, and it was whisked far out into

the harbour by the wind.

He knew that La Mouette had refitted and installed new engines eighteen

months before. With a nostalgic twinge, he had read a snippet in

Lloyd's List. But even nine thousand horsepower couldn't push that

tubby hull at better than eighteen knots, Nick was certain of that. Yet

even with Warlock's superior speed, La Mouette was better placed by a

thousand miles. There was no room for complacency. And what if La

Mouette had set out to double Cape Horn instead of driving north up the

Atlantic? If that had happened, and with Jules Levoisin's luck it might

just have happened, then La Mouette was a long way inside him already.

Anybody else but Jules Levoisin, he thought, why did it have to be him?

And oh God, why now? Why now when I am so vulnerable - emotionally,

physically and financially vulnerable. Oh God, why did it come now?

He felt the false sense of cheer and well-being, with which he had

buoyed himself that morning, fall away from him like a cloak, leaving

him naked and sick and tired again.

I am not ready yet, he thought; and then realized that it was probably

the first time in his adult life he had ever said that to himself. He

had always been ready, good and ready, for anything. But not now, not

this time.

Suddenly Nicholas Berg was afraid, as he had never been before. He was

empty, he realized, there was nothing in him, no strength, no

confidence, no resolve. The depth of his defeat by Duncan Alexander,

the despair of his rejection by the woman he loved, had broken him. He

felt his fear turn to terror, knowing that his wave had come, and would

sweep by him now, for he did not have the strength to ride it.

Some deep instinct warned him that it would be the last wave, there

would be nothing after it. The choice was go now, or never go again.

And he knew he could not go, he

27 could not go against Jules Levoisin, he could not challenge the old

master. He could not go - he could not reject the certainty of the Esso

tow, he did not have the nerve now to risk all that he had left on a

single throw. He had just lost a big one, he couldn't go at risk again.

The risk was too great, he was not ready for it, he did not have the

strength for it.

He wanted to go to his cabin and throw himself on his bunk and sleep -

and sleep. He felt his knees buckling with the great weight of his

despair, and he hungered for the oblivion of sleep.

He turned back into the bridge, out of the wind. He was broken,

defeated, he had given up. As he went towards the sanctuary of his day

cabin, he passed the long command console and stopped involuntarily.

His officers watched him in a tense, electric silence.

His right hand went out and touched the engine telegraph, sliding the

pointer from off to stand by'.

Engine Room/he heard a voice speak in calm and level tones, so it could

not be his own. Start main engines, said the voice.

Seemingly from a great distance he watched the faces of his deck

officers bloom with unholy joy, like old-time pirates savouring the

prospect of a prize.

The strange voice went on, echoing oddly in his ears, 'Number One, ask

the Harbour Master for permission to clear harbour immediately - and,

Pilot, course to steer for the last reported position of Golden

Adventurer, please.

From the corner of his eye, he saw David Allen punch the Third Officer

lightly but gleefully on the shoulder before he hurried to the radio

telephone.

Nicholas Berg felt suddenly the urge to vomit. So he stood very still

and erect at the navigation console and fought back the waves of nausea

that swept over him, while his officers bustled to their sea-going

stations.

28 Bridge. This is the Chief Engineer/ said a disembodied voice from

the speaker above Nick's head. Main engines running. A pause and then

that word of special Aussie approbation. Beauty! - but the Chief

pronounced it in three distinct syllables, Be-yew-dy!'

Warlock's wide-flared bows were designed to cleave and push the waters

open ahead of her and in those waters below latitude 40 she ran like an

old bull otter, slick and wet and fast for the south.

Uninterrupted by any land-mass, the cycle of great atmospheric

depressions swept endlessly across those cold open seas, and the wave

patterns built up into a succession of marching mountain ranges.

Warlock was taking them on her starboard shoulder, bursting through each

crest in a white explosion that leapt from her bows like a torpedo

strike, the water coming aboard green and clear over her high fore-dec,

and sweeping her from stern to stern as she twisted and broke out,

dropping sheer into the valley that opened ahead of her.

Her twin ferro-bronze propellers broke clear of the surface, the

slamming vibration instantly controlled by the sophisticated

variable-pitch gear, until she swooped forward and the propellers bit

deeply again, the thrust of the twin Mirrlees diesels hurtling her

towards the slope of the next swell.

Each time it seemed that she could not rise in time to meet the cliff of

water that bore down on her. The water was black under the grey sunless

sky. Nick had lived through typhoon and Caribbean hurricane, but had

never seen water as menacing and cruel as this. It glittered like the

molten slag that pours down the dump of an iron foundry and cools to the

same iridescent blackness.

29 In the deep valleys between the crests, the wind was blanketed so

they fell into an unnatural stillness, an eerie silence that only

enhanced the menace of that towering slope of water.

In the trough, Warlock heeled and threw her head up, climbing the slope

in a gut-swooping lift, that buckled the knees of the watch. As she

went up, so the angle of her bridge tilted back, and that sombre

cheerless sky filled the forward bridge windows with a vista of low

scudding cloud.

The wind tore at the crest of the wave ahead of her, ripping it away

like white cotton from the burst seams of a black mattress, splattering

custard-thick spume against the armoured glass. Then Warlock put her

sharp steel nose deeply into it. Gouging a fat wedge of racing green

over her head twisting violently at the jarring impact, dropping

sideways over the crest, and breaking out to fall free and repeat the

cycle again.

Nick was wedged into the canvas Master's seat in the corner of the

bridge. He swayed like a camel-driver to the thrust of the sea and

smoked his black cheroots quietly, his head turning every few minutes to

the west, as though he expected at any moment to see the black ugly hull

of La Mouette come up on top o t e next swell. But he . -mew she was a

thousand miles away still, racing down the far leg of the triangle which

had at its apex the stricken liner.

If she is running/ Nick thought, and knew that there was no doubt. La

Mouette was running as frantically as was Warlock - and as silently.

Jules Levoisin had taught Nick the trick of silence. He would not use

his radio until he had the liner on his radar scan. Then he would come

through in clear, I will be in a position to put a line aboard you in

two hours. Do you accept "Lloyd's Open Form"?

The Master of the distressed vessel, having believed himself abandoned

without succour, would over-react to the promise of salvation, and when

La Mouette came bustling

30 up over the horizon, flying all her bunting and with every light

blazing in as theatrical a display as Jules could put up, the relieved

Master would probably leap at the offer of 'Lloyd's Open Form - a

decision that would surely be regretted by the ship's owners in the cold

and unemotional precincts of an Arbitration court.

When Nick had supervised the design of Warlock, he had insisted that she

look good as well as being able to perform. The master of a disabled

ship was usually a man in a highly emotional state. Mere physical

appearance might sway him in the choice between two salvage tugs coming

up on him. Warlock looked magnificent; even in this cold and cheerless

ocean, she looked like a warship.

The trick would be to show her to the master of Golden Adventurer before

he struck a bargain with La Mouette.

Nick could no longer sit inactive in his canvas seat. He judged the

next towering swell and, with half a dozen quick strides, crossed the

bridge deck in those fleeting moments as Warlock steadied in the trough.

He grabbed the chrome handrail above the Decca computer.

On the keyboard he typed the function code that would set the machine in

navigational mode, coordinating the transmissions she was receiving from

the circling satellite stations high above the earth. From these were

calculated Warlock's exact position over the earth's surface, accurate

to within twenty-five yards.

Nick entered the ship's position and the computer compared this with the

plot that Nick had requested four hours previously. It printed out

quickly the distance run and the ship's speed made good. Nick frowned

angrily and swung round to watch the helmsman.

In this fiercely running cross sea, a good man could hold Warlock on

course more efficiently than any automatic steering device. He could

anticipate each trough and crest and prevent the ship paying off across

the direction of the

3I swells, and then kicking back violently as she went over, wasting

critical time and distance.

Nick watched the helmsman work, judging each sea as it came aboard,

checking the ship's heading on the big repeating compass above the man's

head. After ten minutes, Nick realized that there was no wastage;

Warlock was making as good a course as was possible in these conditions.

The engine telegraph was pulled back to her maximum safe power-setting,

the course was good and yet Warlock was not delivering those few extra

knots of speed that Nick Berg had relied on when he had made the

critical decision to race La Mouette for the prize.

Nick had relied on twenty-eight knots against the Frenchman's eighteen,

and he was not getting it. Involuntarily, he glanced out to the west as

Warlock came up on the top of the next crest. Through the streaming

windows, from which the spinning wipers cleared circular areas of clean

glass, Nick looked out across a wilderness of black water, forbidding

and cold and devoid of other human presence.

Abruptly Nick crossed to the R/T microphone.

"Engine Room confirm we are top of the green. 'Top of the green, it is,

Skipper.

The Chief's casual tones floated in above the crash of the next sea

coming aboard.

Top of the green'was the maximum safe power-setting recommended by the

manufacturers for those gigantic Mirrlees diesels. It was a far higher

setting than top economical power, and they were burning fuel at a

prodigious rate. Nick was pushing her as high as he could without going

into the red, danger area above eighty percent of full power, which at

prolonged running might permanently damage her engines.

Nick turned away to his seat, and wedged himself into it. He groped for

his cheroot case, and then checked him

32 self, the lighter in his hand. His tongue and mouth felt furred over

and dry. He a( smo d without a break every waking minute since leaving

Cape Town, and God knows he had slept little enough since then. He ran

his tongue around his mouth with distaste before he returned the cheroot

to his case, and crouched in his seat staring ahead, trying to work out

why Warlock was running slow.

Suddenly he straightened and considered a possibility that brought a

metallic green gleam of anger into Nick's eyes.

He slid out of his seat, nodded to the Third Officer who had the deck

and ducked through the doorway in the back of the bridge into his day

cabin. It was a ploy. He didn't want his visit below decks announced,

and from his own suite he darted into the companionway.

The engine control room was as modern and gleaming as Warlock's

navigation bridge. It was completely enclosed with double glass to cut

down the thunder of her engines.

The control console was banked below the windows, and all the ship's

functions were displayed in green and red digital figures.

The view beyond the windows into the main engine room was impressive,

even for Nick who had designed and supervised each foot of the layout.

The two Mirrlees diesel engines filled the white-painted cavern with

only walking space between, each as long as four Cadillac Eldorados

parked bumper to bumper and as deep as if another four Cadillacs had

been piled on top of them.

The thirty-six cylinders of each block were crowned with a moving forest

of valve stems and con-rod ends, each enormous powerhouse capable of

pouring out eleven thousand usable horsepower.

it was only custom that made it necessary for any visitor, including the

Master, to announce his arrival in the engine room to the Chief

Engineer. Ignoring custom, Nick slipped quietly through the glass

sliding doors, out of the hot burned-oil stench of the engine room into

the cooler and sweeter conditioned air of the control room.

Vin Baker was deep in conversation with one of his electricians, both of

them kneeling before the open doors of one of the tall grey steel

cabinets which housed a teeming mass of coloured cables and transistor

switches. Nick had reached the control console before the Chief

Engineer uncoiled his lanky body from the floor and spun round to face

him.

When Nick was very angry, his lips compressed in a single thin white

line, the thick dark eyebrows seemed to meet above the snapping green

eyes and large slightly beaked nose.

You pulled the over-ride on me/ he accused in a flat, passionless voice

that did not betray his fury. You're governing her out at seventy

percent of power. That's top of the green in my book, Vin Baker told

him.

I'm not running my engines at eighty percent in this sea.

She'll shake the guts out of herself. He paused and the stern was flung

up violently as Warlock crashed over the top of another sea. The

control room shuddered with the vibration of the screws breaking out of

the surface, spinning wildly in the air before they could bite again.

Listen to her, man. You want me to pour on more of it?

She's built to take it. Nothing's built to run that hard, and live in

this sea. I want the over-ride out/ said Nick flatly, indicating the

chrome handle and pointer with which the engineer could cancel the power

settings asked for by the bridge. I don't care when you do it - just as

long as it's any time within the next five seconds., You get out of my

engine room - and go play with your toys. 'All right/ Nick nodded, I'll

do it myself. And he reached for the over-ride gear.

You take your hands off my engines/howled Vin Baker, and picked up the

iron locking handle off the deck. You touch my engines and I'll break

your teeth out of your head, you ice-cold Pommy bastard. Even in his own

anger, Nick blinked at the epithet, When he thought about the blazing

passions and emotions that seethed within him, he nearly laughed aloud.

Ice cold, he thought, so that's how he sees me.

You stupid Bundaberg-swilling galah he said quietly, as he reached for

the over-ride. I don't really care if I have to kill you first, but we

are going to eighty percent! It was Vin Baker's turn to blink behind

his smeared glasses, he had not expected to be insulted in the

colloquial. He dropped the heavy steel handle to the deck. It fell

with a clang.

I don't need it/he announced, and tucked his spectacles into his back

pocket and hoisted his trousers with both elbows. It will be more fun

to take you to pieces by hand.

It was only then that Nick realized how tall the engineer was. His arms

were ridged with the lean wiry taut muscle of hard physical labour. His

fists, as he balled them, were lumpy with scar tissue across the

knuckles and the size of a pair of nine-pound hammers. He went down

into a fighter's crouch, and rode the plunging deck with an easy flexing

of the long powerful legs.

As Nicholas touched the chrome over-ride handle, the first punch came

from the level of Baker's knees, but it came so fast that Nick only just

had time to sway away from it. It whistled up past his jaw and scraped

the skin from the outside corner of his eye, but he counter-punched

instinctively, swaying back and slamming it in under the armpit, feeling

the blow land so solidly that his teeth jarred in his own head. The

Chief's breath hissed, but he swung left-handed and a bony fist crushed

the pad of muscle on the point of Nick's shoulder, bounced off and

caught him high on the temple.

Even though it was a glancing blow, it felt as though a door had slammed

in Nick's head, and resounding darkness closed behind his eyes.

He fell forward into a clinch to ride the darkness, grabbing the lean

hard body and smothering it in a bear hug as he tried to clear the

singing darkness in his head.

He felt the Chief shift his weight, and was shocked at the power in that

wiry frame, it took all his own strength to hold him. Suddenly and

clearly he knew what was going to happen next. There were little white

ridges of scar tissue half hidden by the widow's peak of flopping sandy

hair on the Chief's forehead. Those scars from previous conflicts

warned Nick.

Vin Baker reared back, like a cobra flaring for the strike, and then

flung his head forward; it was the classic butt aimed for Nick's face

and, had it landed squarely, it would have crushed in his nose and

broken his teeth off level to the gums - but Nick anticipated, and

dropped his own chin, tucking it down hard so that their foreheads met

with a crack like a breaking oak branch.

The impact broke Nick's grip, and both of them reeled apart across the

heaving deck, Vin Baker howling like a moon-sick dog and clutching his

own head.

Fight fair, you Pommy bastard! he howled in outrage, and he came up

short against the steel cabinets that lined the far side of the control

room. The astonished electrician dived for cover under the control

console, scattering tools across the deck.

Vin Baker lay for a moment gathering his lanky frame, and then, as

Warlock swung hard over, rolling viciously in the cross sea, he used her

momentum to hurl himself down the steeply tilting deck, dropping his

head again like a battering ram to crush in Nick's ribs as he charged.

Nick turned like a cattle man working an unruly steer.

He whipped one arm round Vin Baker's neck and ran with him, holding his

head down and building up speed across the full length of the control

room. They reached the armoured glass wall at the far end, and the top

of Vin Baker's head was the point of impact with the weight of both

their bodies behind it.

The Chief Engineer came round at the prick of the needle that Angel

forced through the thick flap of open flesh on top of his head. He came

round fighting drunkenly, but the cook held him down with one huge hairy

arm.

Easy, love. Angel pulled the needle through the torn red weeping scalp

and tied the stitch.

Where is he, where is the bastard? slurred the Chief.

It's all over, Chiefe, Angel told him gently. And you are lucky he

bashed you on the head - otherwise he might have hurt you.

The Chief winced as Angel pulled the thread up tight and knotted another

stitch.

He tried to mess with my engines. I taught the bastard a lesson.

"You've terrified him/ Angel agreed sweetly. Now you take a swig of

this and lie still. I want you in this bunk for twelve hours - and I

might come and tuck you in. I'm going back to my engines, announced the

Chief, and drained the medicine glass of brown spirit, then whistled at

the bite of the fumes.

Angel left him and crossed to the telephone. He spoke quickly into it,

and as the Chief lumbered off the bunk, Nick Berg stepped into the

cabin, and nodded to the cook.

Thank you, Angel. Angel ducked out of the cabin and left them facing

each other. The Chief opened his mouth to snarl at Nick.

Jules Levoisin in La Mouette has probably made five hundred miles on us

while you have been playing prima donna/ said Nick quietly, and Vin

Baker's mouth stayed open, although no sound came out of it.

I built this ship to run fast and hard in just this kind of contest, and

now you are trying to do all of us out of prize money! Nick turned on

his heel and went back up the companionway to his navigation deck. He

settled into his canvas chair and fingered the big purple swelling on

his forehead tenderly. His head felt as though a rope had been knotted

around it and twisted up tight. He wanted to go to his cabin and take

something for the pain, but he did not want to miss the call when it

came.

He lit another cheroot, and it tasted like burned tarred rope. He

dropped it into the sandbox and the telephone at his shoulder rang once.

Bridge, this is the Engine Room. Go ahead, Chief! We are going to

eighty percent now. Nick did not reply, but he felt the change in the

engine vibration and the more powerful rush of the hull beneath him.

Nobody told me La Mouette was running against us. No way that

frog-eating bastard's going to get a line on her first/ announced Vin

Baker grimly, and there was a silence between them. Something more had

to be said.

I bet you a pound to a pinch of kangaroo dung/ challenged the Chief,

that you don't know what a galah is, and that you've never tasted a

Bundaberg rum in your life. Nick found himself smiling, even through

the blinding pain in his head.

Be-yew-dy! Nick said, making three syllables of it and keeping the

laughter out of his voice, as he hung up the receiver.

Dave Allen's voice was apologetic. Sorry to wake you, sir, but the

Golden Adventurer is reporting. I'm coming/mumbled Nick, and swung his

legs off the bunk. He had been in that black death-sleep of exhaustion,

but it took him only seconds to pull back the dark curtains from his

mind. It was his old training as a watch-keeping officer.

He rubbed away the last traces of sleep, feeling the rasping black

stubble of his beard under his fingers as he crossed quickly to his

bathroom. He spent forty seconds in bathing his face and combing his

tousled hair, and regretfully decided there was no time to shave.

Another rule of his was to look good in a world which so often judged a

man by his appearance.

When he went out on to the navigation bridge, he knew at once that the

wind had increased its velocity. He guessed It was rising force six

now, and Warlock's motion was more violent and abandoned. Beyond the

warm, dimly lit capsule of the bridge, all those elements of cold water

and vicious racing winds turned the black night to a howling tumult.

The Trog was crouched over his machines, grey and wizened and sleepless.

He hardly turned his head to hand Nick the message flimsy.

Master of Golden Adventurer to Christy Marine/ the Decca decoded

swiftly, and Nick grunted as he saw the new position report. Something

had altered drastically in the liner's circumstances. Main engines

still unserviceable. Current setting easterly and increasing to eight

knots.

Wind rising force six from north-west. Critical ice danger to the ship.

What assistance can I expect? There was a panicky note to that last

line, and Nick saw why when he compared the liner's new position on the

spread chart.

She's going down sharply on the lee shore/ David muttered as he worked

quickly over the chart. The current and wind are working together -

they are driving her down on to the land. He touched the ugly broken

points of Coatsland's shoreline with the tip of one finger.

Is he eighty miles offshore now. At the rate she is drifting, it will

take her only another ten hours before she goes aground. if she doesn't

hit an iceberg first/ said Nick. From the Master's last message, it

sounds as though they are into big ice. That's a cheerful thought/

agreed David, and straightened up from the chart.

What's our time to reach her? Another forty hours, sir/ David hesitated

and pushed the thick white-gold lock of hair off his forehead, if we can

make good this speed - but we may have to reduce when we reach the ice.

Nick turned away to his canvas chair. He felt the need to pace back and

forward, to release the pent-up forces within him. However, any

movement in this heavy pounding sea was not only difficult but downright

dangerous, so he groped his way to the chair and wedged himself in,

staring ahead into the clamorous black night.

He thought about the terrible predicament of the liner's Captain. His

ship was at deadly risk, and the lives of his crew and passengers with

it.

How many lives? Nick cast his mind back and came up with the figures.

The Golden Adventurer's full complement of officers and crew was 235,

and there was accommodation for 375 passengers, a possible total of over

six hundred souls. If the ship was lost, Warlock would be hard put to

take aboard that huge press of human life.

Well, sir, they signed on for adventure/ David Allen spoke into his

thoughts as though he had heard them, and they are getting their money's

worth. Nick glanced at him, and nodded. Most of them will be elderly.

A berth on that cruise costs a fortune, and it's usually only the

oldsters who have that sort of gold. If she goes aground, we are going

to lose life!

With respect, Captain/ David hesitated, and blushed again for the first

time since leaving port, if her Captain knows that assistance is on the

way, it may prevent him doing something crazy! Nick was silent. The

Mate was right, of course. It was cruel to leave them in the despair of

believing they were alone down there in those terrible ice fields. The

Adventurer's Captain could make a panic decision, one that could be

averted if he knew how close succour was.

The air temperature out there is minus five degrees, and if the wind is

at thirty miles an hour, that will make it a lethal chill factor. If

they take to the boats in that -'David was interrupted by the Trog

calling from the radio room.

The owners are replying. it was a long message that Christy Marine were

sending to their Captain. It was filled with those same hollow

assurances that a surgeon gives to a cancer patient, but one paragraph

had relevance for Nick: all efforts being made to contact salvage tugs

reported operating South Atlantic. David Allen looked at him

expectantly. It was the right humane thing to do. To tell them he was

only eight hundred miles away, and closing swiftly.

Nervous energy fizzed in Nick's blood, making him restless and angry. On

an impulse he left his chair and carefully crossed the heaving deck to

the starboard wing of the bridge.

He slid open the door and stepped out into the gale. The shock of that

icy air took his breath away and he gasped like a drowning man.

He felt tears streaming from his eyes across his cheeks and the frozen

spray struck into his face like steel darts.

Carefully he filled his lungs, and his nostrils flared as he smelt the

ice. It was that unrnistakeable dank smell, he remembered so well from

the northern Arctic seas. It was like the body smell of some gigantic

reptilian sea monster and it struck the mariner's chill into his soul.

He could endure only a few seconds more of the gale, but when he stepped

back into the cosy green-lit warmth of the bridge, his mind was clear,

and he was thinking crisply.

Mr. Allen, there is ice ahead. I have a watch on the radar, sir. Very

good/ Nick nodded, but we'll reduce to fifty percent of power. He

hesitated, and then went on, and maintain radio silence. The decision

was hard made, and Nick saw the accusation in David Allen's eyes before

he turned away to give the orders for the reduction in power. Nick felt

a sudden and uncharacteristic urge to explain the decision to him.

He did not know why - perhaps he needed the Mate's understanding and

sympathy.

Instantly Nick saw that as a symptom of his weakness and vulnerability.

He had never needed sympathy before, and he steeled himself against it

now.

His decision to maintain radio silence was correct. He was dealing with

two hard men. He knew he could not afford to give an inch of sea room

to Jules Levoisin. He would force him to open radio contact first. He

needed that advantage.

The other man with whom he had to deal was Duncan Alexander, and he was

a hating man, dangerous and vindictive. He had tried once to destroy

Nick - and perhaps he had already succeeded. Nick had to guard himself

now, he must pick with care his moment to open negotiations with Christy

Marine and the man who had displaced him at its head. Nick must be in a

position of utmost strength when he did so.

Jules Levoisin must be forced to declare himself first, Nick decided.

The Captain of the Golden Adventurer would have to be left in the

agonies of doubt a little longer, and Nick consoled himself with the

thought that any further drastic change in the liner's circumstances or

a decision by the Master to abandon his ship and commit his company to

the lifeboats would be announced on the open radio channels and would

give him a chance to intervene.

Nick was about to caution the Trog to keep a particular watch on Channel

16 for La Mouette's first transmission, then he checked himself. That

was another thing he never did - issue unnecessary orders. The Trog's

grey wrinkled head was wreathed in clouds of reeking cigar smoke but was

bowed to his mass of electronic equipment, and he adjusted a dial with

careful lover's fingers; his little eyes were bright and sleepless as

those of an ancient sea turtle.

Nick went to his chair and settled down to wait out the few remaining

hours of the short Antarctic summer night.

The radar screen had shown strange and alien capes and headlands above

the sea clutter of the storm, strange islands, anomalies which did not

relate to the Admiralty charts. Between these alien masses shone myriad

other smaller contacts, bright as fireflies, any one of which could have

been the echo of a stricken ocean liner - but which was not.

As Warlock nosed cautiously down into this enchanted sea, the dawn that

had never been far from the horizon flushed out, timorous as a bride,

decked in colours of gold and pink that struck splendorous splinters of

light off the icebergs.

The horizon ahead of them was cluttered with ice, some of the fragments

were but the size of a billiard table and they bumped and scraped down

the Warlock's side, then swung and bobbed in her wake as she passed.

There were others the size of a city block, weird and fanciful

structures of honeycombed white ice, that stood as tall as Warlock's

upperworks as she passed.

White ice is soft ice/ Nick murmured to David Allen beside him, and then

caught himself. it was an unnecessary speech, inviting familiarity, and

before the Mate could answer, Nick turned quickly away to the

radar-repeater and lowered his face to the eye-piece in the coned hood.

For a minute he studied the images of the surrounding ice in the

darkened body of the instrument, then went back to his seat and stared

ahead impatiently.

Warlock was running too fast, Nick knew it; he was relying on the

vigilance of his deck officers to carry her through the ice. Yet still

this speed was too slow for his seething impatience.

Above their horizon rose another shoreline, a great unbroken sweep of

towering cliff which caught the low sun, and glowed in emerald and

amethyst, a drifting tableland of solid hard ice, forty miles across and

two hundred feet high.

As they closed with that massive translucent island, so the colours that

glowed through it became more hauntingly beautiful. The cliffs were

rent by deep bays, and split by crevasses whose shadowy depths were dark

sapphire, blue and mysterious, paling out to a thousand shades of green.

My God, it's beautiful, said David Allen with the reverence of a men

kneeling in a cathedral.

The crests of the ice cliffs blazed in clearest ruby; to windward, the

big sea piled in and crashed against those cliffs, surging up them in

explosive bursts of white spray.

Yet the iceberg did not dip nor swing or work, even in that murderous

sea.

Look at the lee she is making/Dave Allen pointed. You could ride out a

force twelve behind her. On the leeward side, the waters were protected

from the wind by that mountain of sheer ice. Green and docile, they

lapped those mysterious blue cliffs, and Warlock went into the lee,

passing in a ship's length from the plunging rearing action of a wild

horse into the tranquillity of a mountain lake, calm, windless and

unnatural.

in the calm, Angel brought trays piled with crisp brown baked Cornish

pasties and steaming mugs of thick creamy cocoa, and they ate breakfast

at three in the morning, marvelling at the fine pale sunlight and the

towers of incredible beauty, the younger officers shouting and laughing

when a school of five black killer whales passed so close that they

could see their white cheek patterns and wide grinning mouths through

the icy clear waters.

The great mammals circled the ship, then ducked beneath her hull,

surging up on the far side with their huge black triangular fins

shearing the surface as they blew through the vents in the top of their

heads. The fishy stink of their breath pervaded the bridge, and then

they were gone, and Warlock motored calmly along in the lee of the ice,

like a holiday launch of day-trippers.

Nicholas Berg did not join the spontaneous gaiety. He munched one of

Angel's delicious pies full of meat and thick gravy, but he could not

finish it. His stomach was too tense. He found himself resenting the

high spirits of his officers. The laughter offended him, now when his

whole life hung in precarious balance. He felt the temptation to quell

them with a few harsh words, conscious of the power he had to plunge

them into instant consternation.

Nick listened to their carefree banter and felt old enough to be their

father, despite the few years difference in their ages. He was

impatient with them, irritated that they should be able to laugh like

this when so much was at stake - six hundred human lives, a great ship,

tens of millions of dollars, his whole future. They would probably

never themselves know what it felt like to put a lifetime's work at risk

on a single flip of the coin - and then suddenly, unaccountably, he

envied them.

He could not understand the sensation, could not fathom why suddenly he

longed to laugh with them, to share the companionship of the moment, to

be free of pressure for just a little while. For fifteen years, he had

not known that sort of hiatus, had never wanted it.

He stood up abruptly, and immediately the bridge was silent. Every

officer concentrating on his appointed task, not one of them glancing at

him as he paced once, slowly, across the wide bridge. It did not need a

word to change the mood, and suddenly Nick felt guilty. it was too easy,

too cheap.

Carefully Nick steeled himself, shutting out the weakness, building up

his resolve and determination, bringing all his concentration to bear on

the Herculean task ahead of him, and he paused at the door of the radio

room. The Trog looked up from his machines, and they exchanged a single

glance of understanding. Two completely dedicated men, with no time for

frivolity.

Nick nodded and paced on, the strong handsome face stern and

uncompromising his step firm and measured but when he stopped again by

the side windows of the bridge and looked up at the magnificent cliff of

ice, he felt the doubts surging up again within him.

How much had he sacrificed for what he had gained, how much joy and

laughter had he spurned to follow the high road of challenge, how much

beauty had he passed along the way without seeing it in his haste, how

much love and warmth and companionship? He thought with a fierce pang

of the women who had been his wife, and who had gone now with the child

who was his son. Why had they gone, and what had they left him with -

after all his strivings?

Behind him, the radio crackled and hummed as the carrier beam opened

Channel 16, then it pitched higher as a human voice came through in

clear.

Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the Golden Adventurer! Nick spun and

ran to the radio room as the calm masculine voice read out the

coordinates of the ship's position.

We are in imminent danger of striking. We are preparing to abandon

ship. Can any vessel render assistance?

Repeat, can any vessel render assistance?

Good God/ David Allen's voice was harsh with anxiety, the current's got

them, they're going down on Cape Alarm at nine knots - she's only fifty

miles offshore and we are still two hundred and twenty miles from that

position. Where is La Mouette? growled Nick Berg. "Where the hell is

she? We'll have to open contact now, sir/David Allen looked up from the

chart. You cannot let them go down into the boats - not in this

weather, sir. It would be murder. Thank you, Number One/ said Nick

quietly. Your advice is always welcome. David flushed, but there was

anger and not embarrassment beneath the colour. Even in the stress of

the moment, Nick noted that, and adjusted his opinion of his First

Officer. He had guts as well as brains.

The Mate was right, of course. There was only one thing to consider

now, the conservation of human life.

Nick looked up at the top of the ice cliff and saw the low cloud tearing

off it, rolling and swirling in the wind, pouring down over the edge

like boiling milk frothing from the lip of a great pot.

He had to send now. La Mouette had won the contest of silence. Nick

stared up at the cloud and composed the message he would send. He must

reassure the Master, urge him to delay his decision to abandon ship and

give Warlock the time to close the gap, perhaps even reach her before

she struck on Cape Alarm.

The silence on the bridge was deepened by the absence of wind. They were

all watching him now, waiting for the decision, and in that silence the

carrier beam of Channel 16 hummed and throbbed.

Then suddenly a rich Gallic accent poured into the silent bridge, a full

fruity voice that Nick remembered so clearly, even after all the years.

Master of Golden Adventurer this is the Master of salvage tug La

Mouette. I am proceeding at best speed your assistance. Do you accept

Lloyd's Open Form "No cure no pay Nick kept his face from showing any

emotion, but his heart barged wildly against his ribs. Jules Levoisin

had broken silence.

Plot his position report/ he said quietly.

God! She's inside us/ David Allen's face was stricken as he marked La

Mouette's reported position or. the chart.

She's a hundred miles ahead of us. No/Nick shook his head, He's lying.

Sir? He's lying. He always lies. Nick lit a cheroot and when it was

drawing evenly, he spoke again to his radio officer.

Did you get a bearing? and the Trog looked up from his radio

direction-finding compass on which he was tracing La Mouette's

transmissions.

I have only one coordinate, you won't get a fix But Nick interrupted

him, We'll use his best course from Golfo San Jorge for a fix. He

turned back to David Allen. Plot that. There's a difference of over

three hundred nautical miles. Yes/ Nick nodded. 'That old pirate

wouldn't broadcast an accurate position to all the world. We are inside

him and running five knots better, we'll put a line over Golden

Adventurer before he's in radar contact. Are you going to open contact

with Christy Marine now, sir? No, Mr. Allen. 'But they will do a deal

with La Mouette - unless we bid now. I don't think so/ Nick murmured,

and almost went on to say, Duncan Alexander won't settle for Lloyd's

Open Form while he is the underwriter, and his ship is free and

floating. He'll fight for dailyy hire and bonus, and Jules Levoisin

won't buy that package. He'll hold out for the big plum. They won't do

a deal until the two ships are in visual contact - and by that time I'll

have her in tow and I'll fight the bastard in the awards court for

twenty-five percent of her value But he did not say it. Steady as she

goes, Mr. Allen/was all he said, as he left the bridge.

He closed the door of his day cabin and leaned back against it, shutting

his eyes tightly as he gathered himself.

It had been so very close, a matter of seconds and he would have

declared himself and given the advantage to La Mouette.

Through the door behind him, he heard David Allen s voice. Did you see

him? He didn't feel a thing - not a bloody thing. He was going to let

those poor bastards go into the boats. He must piss ice-water. The

voice was muffled, but the outrage in it was tempered by awe.

Nick kept his eyes shut a moment longer, then he straightened up and

pushed himself away from the door. He wanted it to begin now. It was

in the waiting and the uncertainty which was eroding what was left of

his strength.

Please God, let me reach them in time. And he was not certain whether

it was for the lives or for the salvage award that he was praying.

Captain Basil Reilly, the Master of the Golden Adventurer, was a tall

man, with a lean and wiry frame that promised reserves of strength and

endurance. His face was very darkly tanned and splotched with the dark

patches of benign sun cancer. His heavy mustache was silvered like the

pelt of a snow fox, and though his eyes were set in webs of finely

wrinkled and pouchy skin, they were bright and calm and intelligent.

He stood on the windward wing of his navigation bridge and watched the

huge black seas tumbling in to batter his helpless ship. He was taking

them broadside now, and each time they struck, the hull shuddered and

heeled with a sick dead motion, giving reluctantly to the swells that

rose up and broke over her rails, sweeping her decks from side to side,

and then cascading off her again in a tumble of white that smoked in the

wind.

He adjusted the life-jacket he wore, settling the rough canvas more

comfortably around his shoulders as he reviewed his position once more.

Golden Adventurer had taken the ice in that eight-to-midnight watch

traditionally allotted to the most junior of the navigating officers.

The impact had hardly been noticeable, yet it had awoken the Master from

deep sleep - just a slight check and jar that had touched some deep

chord in the mariner's instinct.

The ice had been a growler, one of the most deadly of all hazards.

The big bergs standing high and solid to catch the radar beams, or the

eye of even the most inattentive deck watch, were easily avoided.

However, the low ice lying awash, with its great bulk and weight almost

completely hidden by the dark and turbulent waters, was as deadly as a

predator in ambush.

The growler showed itself only in the depths of each wave trough, or in

the swirl of the current around it, as though a massive sea-monster

lurked there. At night, these indications would pass unnoticed by even

the sharpest eyes, and below the surface, the wave action eroded the

body of the growler, turning it into a horizontal blade that lay ten

feet or more below the water level and reached out two or three hundred

feet from the visible surface indications.

With the Third Officer on watch, and steaming at cautionary speed of a

mere twelve knots, the Golden Adventurer had brushed against one of

these monsters, and although the actual impact had gone almost unnoticed

on board, the ice had opened her like the knife stroke which splits a

herring for the smoking rack.

It was classic Titanic damage, a fourteen-foot rent through her side,

twelve feet below the Plinisoll line, shearing two of her watertight

compartments, one of which was her main engine room section.

They had held the water easily until the electrical explosion, and since

then, the Master had battled to keep her afloat. Slowly, step by step,

fighting all the way, he had yielded to the sea. All the bilge pumps

were running still, but the water was steadily gaining.

Three days ago he had brought all his passengers up from below the main

deck, and he had battened down all the watertight bulkheads. The crew

and passengers were accommodated now in the lounges and smoking rooms.

The ship's luxury and opulence had been transformed into the crowded,

unhygienic and deteriorating conditions of a city under siege.

It reminded him of the catacombs of the London under ground converted to

air-raid shelters during the blitz. He had been a lieutenant on

shore-leave and he had passed one night there that he would remember for

the rest of his life.

There was the same atmosphere on board now. The sanitary arrangements

were inadequate. Fourteen toilet bowls for six hundred, many of them

seasick and suffering from diarrhoea. There were no baths nor showers,

and insufficient power for the heating of water in the hand basins. The

emergency generators delivered barely sufficient power to work the ship,

to run the pumps, to supply minimal lighting, and to keep the

communicational and navigational equipment running. There was no

heating in the ship and the outside air temperature had fallen to minus

twenty degrees now.

The cold in the spacious public lounges was brutal. The passengers

huddled in their fur coats and bulky life-jackets under mounds of

blankets. There were limited cooking facilities on the gas stoves

usually reserved for adventure tours ashore. There was no baking or

grilling, and most of the food was eaten cold and congealed from cans;

only the soup and beverages steamed in the cold clammy air, like the

breaths of the waiting and helpless multitude.

The desalination plants had not been in use since the ice collision and

now the supply of fresh water was critical; even hot drinks were

rationed.

Of the 368 paying passengers, only forty-eight were below the age of

fifty, and yet the morale was extraordinary. Men and women who before

the emergency could and did complain bitterly at a dress shirt not

ironed to crisp perfection or a wine served a few degrees too cold, now

accepted a mug of beef tea as though it were a vintage ChAteau Margaux,

and laughed and chatted animatedly in the cold, shaming with their

fortitude the few that might have complained. These were an unusual

sample of humanity, men and women of achievement and resilience, who had

come here to this outlandish corner of the globe in search of new

experience. They were mentally prepared for adventure and even danger,

and seemed almost to welcome this as part of the entertainment provided

by the tour.

Yet, standing on his bridge, the Master was under no illusion as to the

gravity of their situation. Peering through the streaming glass, he

watched a work party, led by his First Officer, toiling heroically in

the bows. Four men in glistening yellow plastic suits and hoods,

drenched by the icy seas, working with the slow cold-numbed movements of

automatons as they struggled to stream a sea-anchor and bring the ship's

head up into the sea, so that she might ride more easily, and perhaps

slow her precipitous rush down onto the rocky coast. Twice in the

preceding days, the anchors they had rigged had been torn away by sea

and wind and the ship's dead weight.

Three hours before, he had called his engineering officers up from

below, where the risk to their lives had become too great to chance

against the remote possibility of restoring power to his main engines.

He had conceded the battle to the sea and now he was planning the final

moves when he must abandon his command and attempt to remove six hundred

human beings from this helpless hulk to the even greater dangers and

hardships of Cape Alarm's barren and storm-rent shores.

Cape Alarm was one of those few pinnacles of barren black rock which

thrust out from beneath the thick white mantle of the Antarctic cap,

pounded free of ice like an anvil beneath the eternal hammering assault

of storm and sea and wind.

The long straight ridge protruded almost fifty miles into the eastern

extremity of the Weddell Sea, was fifty miles across at its widest

point, and terminated in a pair of bull's horns which formed a small

protected bay named after the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Shackleton Bay, with its steep purple-black beaches of round polished

pebbles, was the nesting ground of a huge colony of chin-strap penguin,

and for this reason was one of Golden Adventurer's regular ports of

call.

On each tour, the ship would anchor in the deep and calm waters of the

bay, while her passengers went ashore to study and photograph the

breeding birds and the extraordinary geological formations, sculptured

by ice and wind into weird and grotesque shapes.

Only ten days earlier, Golden Adventurer had weighed anchor in

Shackleton Bay and stood out into the Weddell Sea. The weather had been

mild and still, with a slow oily swell and a bright clear sun. Now,

before a force seven gale, in temperatures forty-five degrees colder,

and borne on the wild dark sweep of the current, she was being carried

back to that same black and rocky shore.

There was no doubt in Captain Reilly's mind - they were going to go

aground on Cape Alarm, there was no avoiding that fate with this set of

sea and wind, unless the French salvage tug reached them first.

La Mouette should have been in radar contact already, if the tug's

reported position was correct, and Basil Reilly let a little frown of

worry crease the brown parchment skin of his forehead and shadows were

in his eyes.

Another message from head office, sir. His Second Officer was beside

him now, a young man with the shape of a teddy bear swathed in thick

woollen jerseys and marine blue top coat. Basil Reilly's strict dress

regulations had long ago been abandoned and their breaths steamed in the

frigid air of the navigation bridge.

Very well. Reilly glanced at the flimsy. Send that to the tug master.

The contempt was clear in his voice, his disdain for this haggling

between owners and salvors, when a great ship and six hundred lives were

-at risk in the cold sea.

He knew what he would do if the salvage tug made contact before Golden

Adventurer struck the waiting fangs of rock, he would override his owner

s express orders and exercise his rights as Master by, immediately

accepting the offer of assistance under Lloyd's Open Form.

But let him come/ he murmured to himself. Please God, let him come/and

he raised his binoculars and slowly swept a long jagged horizon where

the peaks of the swells seemed black and substantial as rock. He paused

with a leap of his pulse when something white blinked in the field of

the glasses and then, with a little sick slide, realized that it was

only a random ray of sunlight catching a pinnacle of ice from the

floating bergs.

He lowered the glasses and crossed from the windward wing of the bridge

to the lee. He did not need the glasses now, Cape Alarm was black and

menacing against the sow's-belly grey of the sky. Its ridges and

valleys picked out with gleaming ice and banked snow, and against her

steep shore, the sea creamed and leapt high in explosions of purest

white.

Sixteen miles, sir/ said the First Officer, coming to stand beside him.

And the current seems to be setting a little more northerly now. They

were both silent, as they balanced automatically against the violent

pitch and roll of the deck.

Then the Mate spoke again with a bitter edge to his voice, Where is that

bloody frog? And they watched the night of Antarctica begin to shroud

the cruel lee shore in funereal cloaks of purple and sable, She was very

young, probably not yet twenty-five years of age, and even the layers of

heavy clothing topped by a man's anorak three sizes too big could not

disguise the slimness of her body, that almost coltish elegance of long

fine limbs and muscle toned by youth and hard exercise.

Her head was set jauntily on the long graceful stem of her neck, like a

golden sunflower, and the profuse mane of long hair was sun-bleached,

streaked with silver and platinum and copper gold, twisted up carelessly

into a rope almost as thick as a man's wrist and piled on top of her

head. Yet loose strands floated down on to her forehead and tickled her

nose so that she pursed her lips and puffed them away.

Her hands were both occupied with the heavy tray she carried, and she

balanced like a skilled horsewoman against the ship's extravagant

plunging as she offered it.

Come on, Mrs. Goldberg, she wheedled. It will warm the cockles of your

Turn. I don't think so, my dear/ the white-haired woman faltered.

Just for me, then/ the girl wheedled.

Well/ the woman took one of the mugs and sipped it tentatively. 'It's

good/ she said, and then quickly and furtively, Samantha, has the tug

come yet? It will be here any minute now, and the Captain is a dashing

Frenchman, just the right age for you, with a lovely tickly mustache.

I'm going to introduce you first thing. The woman was a widow in her

late fifties, a little overweight and more than a little afraid, but she

smiled and sat up a little straighter.

You naughty thing/ she smiled.

Just as soon as I've finished with this/ Samantha indicated the tray,

I'll come and sit with you. We'll play some klabrias, okay? When

Samantha Silver smiled, her teeth were very straight and white against

the peach of her tanned cheeks and the freckles that powdered her nose

like gold dust. She moved on.

They welcomed her, each of them, men and women, competing for her

attention, for she was one of those rare creatures that radiate such

warmth, a sort of shining innocence, like a kitten or a beautiful child,

and she laughed and chided and teased them in return and left them

grinning and heartened, but jealous of her going so they followed her

with their eyes. Most of them felt she belonged to them personally, and

they wanted all of her time and presence, making up questions or little

stories to detain her for a few extra moments.

There was an albatross following us a little while ago, Sam. 'Yes, I saw

it through the galley window It was a wandering albatross, wasn't it,

Sam! Oh, come on, Mr. Stewart! You know better than that.

It was Diomedea melanophris, the black-browed albatross, but still it's

good luck. All albatrosses are good luck that's a scientifically proved

fact. Samantha had a doctorate in biology and was one of the ship's

specialist guides. She was on sabbatical leave from the University of

Miami where she held a research fellowship in marine ecology.

Passengers thirty years her senior treated her like a favourite daughter

most of the time. However, in even the mildest crisis they became

childlike in their appeal to her and in their reliance on her natural

strength which they recognized and sought instinctively. She was to

them a combination of beloved pet and den-mother.

While a ship's steward refilled her tray with mugs, Samantha paused at

the entrance to the temporary galley they had set up in the cocktail

room and looked back into the densely packed lounge.

The stink of unwashed humanity and tobacco smoke was almost a solid blue

thing, but she felt a rush of affection for them. They were behaving so

very well, she thought, and she was proud of them.

well done, team, she thought, and grinned. It was not often that she

could find affection in herself for a mass of human beings. Often she

had pondered how a creature so fine and noble and worthwhile as the

human individual could, in its massed state, become so unattractive.

She thought briefly of the human multitudes of the crowded cities.

She hated zoos and animals in cages, remembering as a little girl crying

for a bear that danced endlessly against its bars, driven mad by its

confinement.

The concrete cages of the cities drove their captives into similar

strange and bizarre behaviour. All creatures should be free to move and

live and breathe, she believed, and yet man, the super-predator, who had

denied that right to so many other creatures, was now destroying himself

with the same single mindedness, poisoning and imprisoning himself in an

orgy that made the madness of the lemmings seem logical in comparison.

It was only when she saw human beings like these in circumstances like

these that she could be truly proud of them - and afraid for them.

She felt her own fear deep down, at the very periphery of her awareness,

for she was a sea-creature who loved and understood the sea - and knew

its monumental might. She knew what awaited them out there in the

storm, and she was afraid. With a deliberate effort she lifted the

slump of her shoulders, and set the smile brightly on her lips and

picked up the heavy tray.

At that moment the speakers of the public-address system gave a

preliminary squawk, and then filtered the Captain's cultured and

measured tones into the suddenly silent ship.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. I regret to inform

you that we have not yet established radar contact with the salvage tug

La Mouette, and that I now deem it necessary to transfer the ship's

company to the lifeboats. There was a sigh and stir in the crowded

lounges, heard even above the storm. Samantha saw one of her favourite

passengers reach for his wife and press her silvery-grey head to his

shoulder.

You have all practised the lifeboat drill many times and you know your

teams and stations. I am sure I do not have to impress upon you the

necessity to go to your stations in orderly fashion, and to obey

explicitly the orders of the ship's officers. Samantha set down her

tray and crossed quickly to Mrs. Goldberg. The woman was weeping, softly

and quietly, lost and bewildered, and Samantha slipped her arm around

her shoulder.

Come now/ she whispered. Don't let the others see you cry.

Will you stay with me, Samantha? Of course I will. She lifted the

woman to her feet. It will be all right - you'll see. just think of

the story you'll be able to tell your grandchildren when you get home.

Captain Reilly reviewed his preparations for leaving the ship, going

over them item by item in his mind. He now knew by heart the

considerable list he had compiled days previously from his own vast

experience of Antarctic conditions and the sea.

The single most important consideration was that no person should be

immersed, or even drenched by sea water during the transfer. Life

expectation in these waters was four minutes. Even if the victim were

immediately pulled from the water, it was still four minutes, unless the

sodden clothing could be removed and heating provided. With this wind

blowing, rising eight of the Beaufort scale at forty miles an hour and

an air temperature of minus twenty degrees, the chill factor was at the

extreme of stage seven which, translated into physical terms, meant that

a few minutes exposure would numb and exhaust a man, and that mere

survival was a matter of planning and precaution.

The second most important consideration was the physiological crisis of

his passengers, when they left the comparative warmth and comfort and

security of the ship for the shrieking cold and the violent discomfort

of a life raft afloat in an Antarctic storm.

They had been briefed, and mentally prepared as much as was possible. An

officer had checked each passenger's clothing and survival equipment,

they had been fed high sugar tablets to ward off the cold, and the

life-raft allocations had been carefully worked out to provide balanced

complements, each with a competent crew. member in command. It was as

much as he could do for them, and he turned his attention to the

logistics of the transfer.

The lifeboats would go first, six of them, slung three on each side of

the ship, each crewed by a navigation officer and five seamen. While the

great drogue of the sea-anchor held the ship's head into the wind and

the sea, they would be swung outboard on their hydraulic derricks and

the winches would lower them swiftly to the surface of a sea temporarily

smoothed by the oil sprayed from the pumps in the bows.

Although they were decked-in, powered, and equipped with radio, the

lifeboats were not the ideal vehicles for survival in these conditions.

Within hours, the men aboard them would be exhausted by the cold. For

this reason, none of the passengers would be aboard them. Instead, they

would go into the big inflatable life-rafts, self-righting even in the

worst seas and enclosed with a double skin of insulation. Equipped with

emergency rations and battery powered locator beacons, they would ride

the big black seas more easily and each provide shelter for twenty human

beings, whose body warmth would keep the interior habitable, at least

for the time it took to tow the rafts to land.

The motor lifeboats were merely the shepherds for the rafts. They would

herd them together and then tow them in tandem to the sheltering arms of

Shackleton Bay.

Even in these blustering conditions, the tow should not take more than

twelve hours. Each boat would tow five rafts, and though the crews of

the motor boats would have to change, brought into the canopy of the

rafts and rested, there should be no insurmountable difficulties;

Captain Reilly was hoping for a tow-speed of between three and four

knots.

The lifeboats were packed with equipment and fuel and food sufficient to

keep the shipwrecked party for a month, perhaps two on reduced rations,

and once the calmer shores of the bay had been reached, the rafts would

be carried ashore, the canopies reinforced with slabs of packed snow and

transformed into igloo-type huts to shelter the survivors. They might

be in Shackleton Bay a long time, for even when the French tug reached

them, it could not take aboard six hundred persons, some would have to

remain and await another rescue ship.

Captain Reilly took one more look at the land. It was very close now,

and even in the gloom of the onrushing night, the peaks of ice and snow

glittered like the fangs of some terrible and avaricious monster.

All right/he nodded to his First Officer, we will begin./ The Mate

lifted the small two-way radio to his lips.

Fore-dec. Bridge. You may commence laying the oil now. From each side

of the bows, the hoses threw up silver dragon-fly wings of sprayed

diesel oil, pumped directly from the ship's bunkers; its viscous weight

resisted the wind's efforts to tear it away, and it fell in a thick

coating across the surface of the sea, broken by the floodlights into

the colour spectrum of the rainbow.

Immediately, the sea was soothed, the wind-riven surface flattened by

the weight of oil, so the swells passed in smooth and weighty majesty

beneath the ship's hull.

The two officers on the wing of the bridge could feel the sick,

waterlogged response of the hull. She was heavy with the water in her,

no longer light and quick and alive.

Send the boats away/ said the Captain, and the mate passed the order

over the radio in quiet conversational tones.

The hydraulic arms of the derricks lifted the six boats off their chocks

and swung them out over the ship's side, suspended one moment high above

the surface; then, as the ship fell through the trough, the oil-streaked

crest raced by only 6 feet below their keels. The officer of each

lifeboat must judge the sea, and operate the winch so as to drop neatly

onto the back slope of a passing swell - then instantly detach the

automatic clamps and stand away from the threatening steel cliff of the

ship's side.

In the floodlights, the little boats shone wetly with spray, brilliant

electric yellow in colour, and decorated with garlands of ice like

Christmas toys. In the small armoured-glass windows the officers faces

also glistened whitely with the strain and concentration of these

terrifying moments, as each tried to judge the rushing black seas.

Suddenly the heavy nylon rope that held the cone shaped drogue of the

sea-anchor snapped with a report like a cannon shot, and the rope snaked

and hissed in the air, a vicious whiplash which could have sliced a man

in half.

It was like slipping the head halter from a wild stallion.

Golden Adventurer threw up her bows, joyous to be freed of restraint.

She slewed back across the scend of the sea, and was immediately pinned

helplessly broadside, her starboard side into the wind, and the three

yellow lifeboats still dangling.

A huge wave reared up out of the darkness. As it rushed down on the

ship, one of the lifeboats sheared her cables and fell heavily to the

surface, the tiny propeller churning frantically, trying to bring her

round to meet the wave but the wave caught her and dashed her back

against the steel side of the ship.

She burst like a ripe melon and the guts spilled out of her; from the

bridge they saw the crew swirled helplessly away into the darkness.

The little locator lamps on their lifejackets burned feebly as

fire-flies in the darkness and then blinked out in the storm.

The forward lifeboard was swung like a door-knocker against the ship,

her forward cable jammed so she dangled stern upmost, and as each wave

punched into her, she was smashed against the hull. They could hear the

men in her screaming, a thin pitiful sound on the wind, that went on for

many minutes as the sea slowly beat the boat into a tangle of wreckage.

The third boat was also swung viciously against the hull. The releases

on her clamps opened, and she dropped twenty feet into the boil -and

surge of water, submerging completely and then bobbing free like a

yellow fishing float after the strike. Leaking and settling swiftly,

she limped away into the clamorous night.

Oh, my God! whispered Captain Reilly, and in the harsh lights of the

bridge, his face was suddenly old and haggard. In a single stroke he

had lost half his boats. As yet he did not mourn the men taken by the

sea, that would come later - now it was the loss of the boats that

appalled him, for it threatened the lives of nearly six hundred others.

The other boats - the First Officer's voice was ragged with shock -'the

others got away safely, sir. In the lee of the towering hull, protected

from both wind and sea the other three boats had dropped smoothly to the

surface and detached swiftly. Now they circled out in the dark night,

with their spotlights probing like long white fingers. One of them

staggered over the wildly plunging crests to take off the crew of the

stricken lifeboat, and they left the cracked hull to drift away and

sink.

Three boats/ whispered the Captain, for thirty rafts. He knew that

there were insufficient shepherds for his flock - and yet he had to send

them out, for even above the wind, he thought he could hear the booming

artillery barrage of high surf breaking on a rocky shore. Cape Alarm

was waiting hungrily for his ship.

Send the rafts away/ he said quietly, and then again under his breath,

And God have mercy on us all. Come on, Number 16, called Samantha. Here

we are, Number 16. She gathered them to her, the eighteen passengers

who made up the complement of her allotted life-raft.

Here we are - all together now. No stragglers. They were gathered at

the heavy mahogany doors that opened on to the open forward deck.

Be ready! she told them. When we get the word, we have to move fast.

With the broadsiding seas sweeping the deck and cascading down over the

lee, it would be impossible to embark from landing-nets into a raft

bobbing alongside.

The rafts were being inflated on the open deck, the passengers hustled

across to them and into the canopied interior between waves and then the

laden rafts were lifted over the side by the clattering winches and

dropped into the quieter waters afforded by the tall bulk of the ship.

Immediately, one of the lifeboats picked up the tow and took each raft

out to form the pitiful little convoy.

Right! the Third Officer burst in through the mahogany doors and held

them wide. Quickly! he shouted. all together. Let's go, gang! sang

out Samantha, and there was an awkward rush out on to the wet and

slippery deck. It was only thirty paces to where the raft crouched like

a monstrous yellow bull-frog gaping its ugly dark mouth, but the wind

struck like an axe and Samantha heard them cry out in dismay. Some of

them faltered in the sudden merciless cold.

Come on/ Samantha shouted, pushing those ahead of her, half-supporting

Mrs. Goldberg's plump body that suddenly felt as heavy and uncooperative

as a full sack of wheat. Keep going. Let me have her/ shouted the

Third Officer, and he grabbed Mrs. Goldberg's other arm. Between them

they tumbled her through the entrance of the raft.

Good on you, love/ the officer grinned at Samantha briefly. His smile

was attractive and warm, very masculine and likeable, his name was Ken

and he was five years her senior. They would probably have become

lovers fairly soon, Samantha knew, for he had pursued her furiously

since she stepped aboard in New York. Although she knew she did not

love him, yet he had succeeded in arousing her and she was slowly

succumbing to his obvious charms and her own passionate nature. She had

made the decision to have him, and had been merely savouring it up until

then.

Now, with a pang, she realized that the moment might never come.

I'll help you with the others. She raised her voice above the

hysterical shriek of the wind.

Get in/ he shouted back, and swung her brusquely towards the raft. She

crept into the crowded interior and looked back at the brightly lit deck

that glistened in the arc lamps.

Ken had started back to where one of the women had slipped and fallen.

She sprawled helplessly on the wet deck, while her husband stooped over

her, trying to lift her back to her feet.

Ken reached them and lifted the woman easily; the three of them were the

only ones out on the open deck now, and the two men supported the woman

between them, staggering against the heavy sullen roll of the

waterlogged hull.

Samantha saw the wave come aboard and she shrieked a warning. Go back,

Ken! For God's sake go back! But he seemed not to hear her. The wave

came aboard; over the windward rail like some huge black slippery

sea-monster, it came with a deep silent rush.

Ken! I she screamed, and he looked over his shoulder an instant before

it reached them. Its crest was higher than his head. They could reach

neither the raft, nor the shelter of the mahogany doors. She heard the

clatter of the donkeywinch and the raft lifted swiftly off the deck,

with a swoopmg tug in her guts. The operator could not let the rushing

power of the wave crash into the helpless raft, throwing it against the

superstructure or tearing it's belly out on the ship's railing, for the

frail plastic skin would rupture and it would collapse immediately.

Samantha hurled herself to the entrance and peered down. She saw the

sea take the three figures in a black glittering rush. It cut them

down, and swept them away.

For a moment, she saw Ken clinging to the railing while the waters

poured over him, burying his head in a tumbling fall of white and

furious water. He disappeared and when the ship rolled sullenly back,

shaking herself clear of the water, her decks were empty of any human

shape.

With the next roll of the ship, the winch-operator high up in his

glassed cabin swung the dangling raft outboard and lowered it swiftly

and dexterously to the surface of the sea where one of the lifeboats

circled anxiously, ready to take them in tow.

Samantha closed and secured the plastic door-cover, then she groped her

way through the press of packed and terrified bodies until she found Mrs.

Goldberg.

Are you crying, dear? the elderly woman quavered, clinging to her

desperately.

No/ said Samantha, and placed one arm around her shoulders. No, I'm not

crying. And with her free hand, she wiped away the icy tears that

streamed down her cheeks.

The Trog lifted his headset and looked at Nick through the reeking

clouds of cigar smoke.

Their radio operator has screwed down the key of his set. He's sending

a single unbroken homing beam. Nick knew what that meant - they had

abandoned Golden Adventurer. He nodded once but remained silent.

He had wedged himself into the doorway from the bridge.

The restless impatience that consumed him would not allow him to sit or

be still for more than a few moments at a time. He was slowly facing up

to the reality of disaster.

The dice had fallen against him and his gamble had been with very

survival. It was absolutely certain that Golden Adventurer would go

aground and be beaten into a total wreck by this storm. He could expect

a charter from Christy Marine to assist La Mouette in ferrying the

survivors back to Cape Town, but the fee would be a small fraction of

the Esso tow fee that he had forsaken for this wild and desperate dash

south.

The gamble had failed and he was a broken man. Of course, it would take

months still for the effects of his folly to become apparent, but the

repayments of his loans and the construction bills for the other tug

still building would slowly throttle and bring him down.

We might still reach her before she goes aground/ said David Allen

sturdily, and nobody else on the bridge spoke.

I mean there could be a backlash of the current close inshore which

could hold her off long enough to give us a chance - His voice trailed

off as Nick looked across at him and frowned.

We are still ten hours away from her, and for Reilly to make the

decision to abandon ship, she must have been very close indeed. Reilly

is a good man. Nick had personally selected him to command the Golden

Adventurer. He was a destroyer captain on the North Atlantic run, the

youngest in the navy, and then he was ten years with P & O. They pick

only the best -'He stopped talking abruptly.

He was becoming garrulous. He crossed to the radarscope and adjusted it

for maximum range and illumination before looking down into the

eye-piece. There was much fuzz and sea clutter, but on the extreme

southern edge of the circular screen there showed the solid luminous

glow of the cliffs and peaks of Cape Alarm. In good weather they were a

mere five hours steaming away, but now they had left the shelter of that

giant iceberg and were staggering and plunging wildly through the angry

night. She could have taken more speed, for Warlock was built for big

seas, but always there was the deadly menace of ice, and Nick had to

hold her at this cautionary speed, which meant ten hours more before

they were in sight of Golden Adventurer - if she was still afloat.

Behind him, the Trog's voice crackled rustily with excitement. 'I'm

getting voice - it's only strength one, weak and intermittent. One of

the lifeboats is sending on a battery-powered transmitter. He held his

earphones pressed to his head with both hands as he listened.

They are towing a batch of life-rafts with all survivors aboard to

Shackleton Bay. But they've lost a life-raft/ he said, It's broken away

from their tow-line, and they haven't got enough boats to search for it.

They are asking La Mouette to keep a watch for it. Is La Mouette

acknowledging? The Trog shook his head. She's probably still out of

range of this transmission. Very well. Nick turned back into the

bridge. He had still not broken radio silence, and could feel his

officers disapproval, silent but strong. Again he felt the need for

human contact, for the warmth and comfort of human conversation and

friendly encouragement. He didn't yet have the strength to bear his

failure alone.

He stopped beside David Allen and said, I have been studying the

Admiralty sailing directions for Cape Alarm, David/ and pretended not to

notice that the use of his Christian name had brought a startled look

and quick colour to the mate's features. He went on evenly, the shore

is very steep-to and she is exposed to this westerly weather, but there

are beaches of pebble and the glass is 90 mg UP sharply again. Yes, sir/

David nodded enthusiastically. I have been watching it. Instead of

hoping for a cross-current to hold her off, I suggest you offer a prayer

that she goes up on one of those beaches and that the weather moderates

before she is beaten to pieces. There is still a chance we can put

ground tackle on her before she starts breaking up. I'll say ten Hail

Marys, sir/ grinned David. Clearly he was overwhelmed by this sudden

friendliness from his silent and forbidding Captain. -And say another

ten that we hold our lead on La Mouette/ said Nick, and smiled. It was

one of the few times that David Allen had seen him smile, and he was

Amazed at the change it made to the stern features. They lightened with

a charm and warmth and he had not before noticed the clear green of Nick

Berg's eyes and how white and even were his teeth.

Steady as she goes/ said Nick. Call me if anything changes/and he

turned away to his cabin.

Steady as she goes, it is, sir/ said David Allen with a new friendliness

in his voice.

The strange and marvelous lights of the Aurora Australis quivered and

flickered in running streams of red and green fire along the horizon,

and formed an incredible backdrop for the death agonies of a great ship.

Captain Reilly looked back through the small portholes of the leading

lifeboat and watched her going to her fate. It seemed to him she had

never been so tall and beautiful as in these terrible last moments. He

had loved many ships, as if each had been a wonderful living creature,

but he had loved no other ship more than Golden Adventurer, and he felt

something of himself dying with her.

He saw her change her action. The sea was feeling the land now, the

steep bank of Cape Alarm, and the ship seemed to panic at the new

onslaught of wave and wind, as though she knew what fate awaited her

there.

She was rolling through thirty degrees, showing the dull red streak of

her belly paint as she came up short at the limit of each huge

penduluming arc. There was a headland, tall black cliffs dropping sheer

into the turbulent waters and it seemed that Golden Adventurer must go

full on to them, but in the last impossible moments she slipped by,

borne on the backlash of the current, avoiding the cliffs and swinging

her bows on into the shallow bay beyond where she was hidden from

Captain Reilly's view.

He stood for many minutes more, staring back across the leaping

wave-tops and in the strange unnatural light of the heavens his face was

greenish grey and heavily furrowed with the marks of grief.

Then he sighed once, very deeply, and turned away, devoting all his

attention to guiding his pathetic limping little convoy to the safety of

Shackleton Bay.

Almost immediately it was apparent that the fates had relented, and

given them a favourable inshore current to carry them up on to the

coast. The lifeboats were strung out over a distance of three miles,

each of them with its string of bloated and clumsy rafts lumbering along

in its wake. Captain Reilly had two-way VHF radio contact with each of

them, and despite the brutal cold, they were all in good shape and

making steady and unexpectedly rapid progress. Three or four hours

would be sufficient, he began to hope. They had lost so much life

already, and he could not be certain that there would be no further

losses until he had the whole party ashore and encamped.

Perhaps the tragic run of bad luck had changed at- last, he thought, and

he picked up the small VHT radio. Perhaps the French tug was in range

at last and he began to call her.

La Mouette, do you read me? Come in, The lifeboat was low down on the

water of the little set was feeble in the vastness yet he kept on

calling.

They had accustomed themselves to the extravagant action of the disabled

liner, her majestic roll and pitch, as regular as a gigantic metronome.

They had adjusted to the cold of the unheated interior of the great

ship, and the discomfort of her crowded and unsanitary conditions.

They had steeled themselves and tried to prepare themselves mentally for

further danger and greater hardship but not one of the survivors in

life-raft Number 16 had imagined anything like this. Even Samantha, the

youngest, probably physically the toughest and certainly the one most

prepared by her training and her knowledge and love of the sea, had not

imagined what it would be like in the raft.

It was utterly dark, not the faintest glimmer of light penetrated the

insulated domed canopy, once its entrance was secured against the sea

and the wind.

Samantha, realized almost immediately how the darkness would crush their

morale and, more dangerously, would induce disorientation and vertigo,

so she ordered two of them at a time to switch on the tiny locator bulbs

and ice, on their life-jackets. it gave just a glimmering of light,

enough to let them see each others faces and take a little comfort in

the proximity of other humans.

Then she arranged their seating, making them form a circle around the

sides with all their legs pointing inwards, to give the raft better

balance and to ensure that each of them had space to stretch out.

Now that Ken had gone, she had naturally taken command, and, as

naturally, the others had turned to her for guidance and comfort. It

was Samantha who had gone out through the opening into the brutal

exposure of the night to take aboard and secure the tow-rope from the

lifeboat.

She had come in again half-frozen, shaking in a palsy of cold, with her

hands and face numbed. it had taken nearly half an hour of hard massage

before feeling returned and she was certain that she had avoided

frost-bite.

Then the tow began, and if the movement of the light raft had been wild

before, it now became a nightmare of uncoordinated movement. Each whim

of sea and wind was transmitted directly to the huddling circle of

survivors, and each time the raft pulled away or sheered off, the

tow-rope brought it up with a violent lurch and jerk.

The wave crests whipped up by the wind and feeling the press of the land

were up to twenty feet high, and the raft swooped over them and dropped

heavily into the troughs.

She did not have the lateral stability of a keel, so she spun on her

axis until the tow-rope jerked her up and she spun the other way. The

first of them to start vomiting was Mrs. Goldberg and it spurted in a

warm jet down the side of Samantha's anorak.

The canopy was almost airtight, except for the small ventilation holes

near the apex of the roof, and immediately the sweetish acrid stench of

vomit permeated the raft. Within minutes, half a dozen of the other

survivors were vomiting also.

It was the cold, however, that frightened Samantha. The cold was the

killer. It came up even through the flexible insulated double skin of

the deck, and was transferred into their buttocks and legs. It came in

through the plastic canopy and froze the condensation of their breaths,

it even froze the vomit on their clothing and on the deck.

Sing! Samantha told them. Come on, sing! Let's do "Yankee Doodle

Dandy", first. You start, Mr. Stewart, come on. Clap your hands, clap

hands with your neighbour. She hectored them relentlessly, not allowing

any of them to fall into that paralytic state which is not true sleep

but the trance caused by rapidly dropping body temperature.

She crawled among them, prodding them awake, popping barley sugar from

the emergency rations into their mouths.

Suck and sing! she commanded them, the sugar would combat the cold and

the sea-sickness. Clap your hands.

Keep moving we'll be there soon. When they could sing no more, she told

them stories and whenever she mentioned the word dog they must all bark

and clap their hands, or crow like the rooster, or bray like the donkey.

Samantha's throat was scratchy with singing and talking and she was

dizzy with fatigue and sick with cold, recognizing in herself the first

symptoms of disinterest and lethargy, the prelude to giving up.

She roused herself, struggling up into the sitting position from where

she had slumped.

I'm going to try and light the stove and get us a hot drink/ she sang

out brightly. Around her there was only a mild stir and somebody

retched painfully.

Who's for a mug of beef tea - she stopped abruptly.

Something had changed. It took her a long moment to realize what it

was. The sound of the wind had muted and the raft was riding more

easily now, it was moving into a more regular rhythm of sweep and fall,

without the dreadful jerk of the tow-rope snapping it back.

Frantically she crawled to the entrance of the raft, and with cold

crippled fingers she tore at the fastenings.

outside the dawn had broken into a clear cold sky of palest ethereal

pinks and mauves. Although the wind had dropped to a faint whisper, the

seas were still big and unruly, and the waters had changed from black to

the deep bottle green of molten glass.

The tow-rope had torn away at the connecting shackle, leaving only a

dangling flap of plastic. Number 16 had been the last raft in the line

being towed by number three, but of the convoy, Samantha could now see

no sign - though she crawled out through the entrance and clung

precariously to the side of the raft, scanning the wave-caps about her

desperately.

There was no sign of a lifeboat, no sight even of the rocky, ice-capped

shores of Cape Alarm. They had drifted away, during the night, into the

vast and lonely reaches of the Weddell Sea.

Despair cramped her belly muscles, and she wanted to cry out in protest

against this further cruelty of fate, but she prevented herself doing

so, and stayed out in the clear and frosty air, drawing it in carefully

for she knew that it could freeze her lung tissue. She searched and

searched until her eyes streamed with the cold and the wind and

concentration. Then at last the cold drove her back into the dark and

stinking interior of the raft. She fell wearily among the supine and

quiescent bodies, and pulled the hood of her anorak more tightly around

her head. She knew it would not take long for them to start dying now,

and somehow she did not care. Her despair was too intense, she let

herself begin sinking into the morass of despondency which gripped all

the others, and the cold crept up her legs and arms.

She closed her eyes, and then opened them again with a huge effort.

I'm not going to die/ she told herself firmly. I refuse to just lie

down and die/and she struggled up onto her knees.

It felt as though she wore a rucksack filled with lead, such was the

physical weight of her despair.

She crawled to the central locker that held all their emergency rations

and equipment.

The emergency locator transmitter was packed in polyurethane and her

fingers were clumsy with cold and the thick mittens, but at last she

brought it out. It was the size of a cigar-box, and the instructions

were printed on the side of it. She did not need to read them, but

switched on the set and replaced it in its slot. Now for forty-eight

hours, or until the battery ran out, it would transmit a DF

homing-signal on 121,5 Mega Hertz.

It was possible, just possible, that the French tug might pick up that

feeble little beam, and track it down to its source. She set it out of

her mind, and devoted herself to the Herculean task of trying to heat

half a mug of water on the small solid-fuel stove without scalding

herself as she held the stove in her lap and balanced it against the

raft's motion. While she worked, she searched for the courage and the

words to tell the others of their predicament.

The Golden Adventurer, deserted of all human beings, her engines dead,

but with her deck lights still burning her wheel locked hard over, and

the morse key in the radio room screwed down to transmit a single

unbroken pulse, drifted swiftly down on the black rock of Cape Alarm.

The rock was of so hard a type of formation that the cliffs were almost

vertical, and even exposed as they were to the eternal onslaught of this

mad sea, they had weathered very little. They still retained the sharp

vertical edges and the glossy polished planes of cleanly fractured

faults.

The sea ran in and hit the cliff without any check.

The impact seemed to jar the very air, like the concussion of bursting

high explosive, and the sea shot high in a white fury against the

unyielding rock of the cliff, before rolling back and forming a reverse

swell.

it was these returning echoes from the cliff that held Golden Adventurer

off the cliff. The shore was so steep-to that it dropped to forty

fathoms directly below the cliffs.

There was no bottom on which the ship could gut herself.

The wind was blanketed by the cliff and in the eerie stillness of air,

she drifted in closer and closer, rolling almost to her limits as the

swells took her broadside. Once she actually touched the rock with her

superstructure on one of those rolls, but then the echo-wave nudged her

away. The next wave pushed her closer, and its smaller weaker offspring

pushed back at her. A man could have jumped from a ledge on the cliff

on to her deck as she drifted slowly, parallel to the rock.

The cliff ended in an abrupt and vertical headland, where it had calved

into three tall pillars of serpentine, as graceful as the sculptured

columns of a temple of Olympian Zeus.

Again, "den Adventurer touched one of those pillars, she bumped it

lightly with her stern. It scraped paint from her side and crushed in

her rail, but then she was past.

The light bump was just sufficient to push her stern round, and she

pointed her bows directly into the wide shallow bay beyond the cliffs.

Here a softer, more malleable rock-formation had been eroded by the

weather, forming a wide beach of purpleblack pebbles, each the size of a

man's head and water worn as round as cannon balls.

Each time the waves rushed up this stony beach, the pebbles struck

against each other with a rattling roar, and the brash of roitten and

mushy sea ice that filled the bay susurrated and clinked, as it rose and

fell with the sea.

Now Golden Adventurer was clear of the cliff, she was more fully in the

grip of the wind. Although the wind was dying, it still had force

enough to move her steadily deeper into the bay, her bows pointed

directly at the beach.

Unlike the cliff shore, the bay sloped up gently to the beach and this

allowed the big waves to build up into rounded sliding humps.

They did not curl and break into white water because the thick layer of

brash ice weighted and flattened them, so that these swells joined with

the wind to throw the ship at the beach with smoothly gathering impetus.

She took the ground with a great metallic groan of her straining plates

and canted over slowly, but the moving pebble beach moulded itself

quickly to her hull I giving gradually, as the waves and wind thrust her

higher and higher until she was firm aground; then, as the short night

ended so the wind fell further, and in sympathy the swells moderated

also and the tide drew back letting the ship settle more heavily.

By noon of that day, Golden Adventurer was held firmly by the bows on

the curved purple beach, canted over at an angle of ice. Only her after

end was still floating, rising and fallen like a see-saw on the swell

patterns which still pushed in steadily, but the plummeting air

temperature was rapidly freezing the brash ice around her stern into a

solid sheet.

The ship stood very tall above the glistening wet beach.

Her upperworks were festooned with rime and long rapier like stalactites

of shining translucent ice hung from her scuppers and from the anchor

fair-leads.

Her emergency generator was still running, and although there was no

human being aboard her, her lights burned gaily and piped music played

softly through her deserted public rooms.

Apart from the rent in her side, through which the sea still washed and

swirled, there was no external evidence of damage, and beyond her the

peaks and valleys of Cape Alarm, so wild and fierce, seemed merely to

emphasize her graceful lines and to underline how rich a prize she was,

a luscious ripe plum ready for the picking.

Down in her radio room, the transmitting key continued to send out an

unbroken beam that could be picked up for five hundred miles around.

Two hours of deathlike sleep - and then Nick Berg woke with a wild

start, knowing that something of direct consequence was about to happen.

But it took fully ten seconds for him to realize where he was.

He stumbled from his bunk, and he knew he had not slept long enough. His

skull was stuffed with the cotton wool of fatigue, and he swayed on his

feet as he shaved in the shower, trying to steam himself awake with the

scalding water.

When he went out on to the bridge, the Trog was still at his equipment.

He looked up at Nick for a moment with his little rheumy pink eyes, and

it was clear that he had not slept at all. Nick felt a prick of shame

at his own indulgence.

We are still inside La Mouette/ said the Trog, and turned back to his

set. I reckon we have an edge of almost a hundred miles. Angel

appeared on the bridge, bearing a huge tray, and the saliva jetted from

under Nick's tongue as he smelled I did a little special for your

brekker, Skipper/ said Angel. I call it "Eggs on Angel's Wings". 'I'm

buying said Nick, and turned back to the Trog with his mouth full and

chewing. What of the Adventurer? She's still sending a DF, but her

position has not altered in almost three hours. What do you mean? Nick

demanded, and swallowed heavily.

No change in position. Then she's aground/ Nick muttered, the food in

his hand forgotten, and at that moment David Allen hurried on to the

bridge still shrugging on his pea-jacket. His eyes were puffy and his

hair was hastily wetted and combed, but spiky at the back from contact

with his pillow. It had not taken him long to hear that the Captain was

on the bridge. And in one piece, if her transmitter is still sending.

It looks like those Hail Marys worked, David. Nick flashed his rare

smile and David slapped the polished teak top of the chart table.

Touch wood, and don't dare the devil. Nick felt his early despair

slipping away with his fatigue, and he took another big mouthful and

savoured it as he strode to the front windows and stared ahead.

The sea had flattened dramatically, but a weak and butter-yellow sun low

on the horizon gave no warmth, and Nick glanced up at the thermometer

and read the outside air temperature at minus thirty degrees.

Down here below 600 south, the weather was so unstable, caught up on the

wheel of endlessly circling atmospheric depressions, that a gale could

rise in minutes and drop to a flat calm almost as swiftly. Yet foul

-weather was the rule. For a hundred days and more each year, the wind

was at gale-force or above. The photographs of Antarctica always gave a

completely false impression Of fine days with the sun sparkling on

pristine snow fields and lovely towering icebergs. The truth was that

you cannot take photographs in a blizzard or a white-out.

Nick distrusted this calm, and yet found himself praying that it would

hold. He wanted to increase speed again, and was on the point of taking

that chance, when the officer of the watch called a sharp alteration of

course.

Ahead of them, Nick made out the sullen swirl of hidden ice below the

surface, like a lurking monster, and as Warlock altered course to avoid

it, the ice broke the surface.

Black ice, striated with bands of glacial mud, ugly and deadly.

Nick did not pass the order for the increase in speed.

We should be raising Cape Alarm within the hour/ David Allen gloated

beside him. If this visibility holds.

It won't/ said Nick. We'll have fog pretty soon/ and he indicated the

surface of the sea, which was beginning to steam, emitting ghostly

tendrils and eddies of seafret, as the difference between sea and air

temperature widened.

We'll be at the Golden Adventurer in four hours more., David was

bubbling with renewed excitement, and he slapped the teak table again.

With your permission, sir, I'll go down and double-check the

rocket-lines and tow equipment.] While the air around them thickened

into a ghostly white soup, and blotted out all visibility to a few

hundred yards, Nick paced the bridge like a caged lion, his hands

clasped behind his back and a black unlit cheroot clamped between his

teeth. He broke his pacing every time that the Trog intercepted another

transmission from either Christy Marine, Jules Levoisin or Captain

Reilly on his VHF radio.

At midmorning, Reilly reported that he and his slow convoy had reached

Shackleton Bay without further losses, that they were taking full

advantage of the moderating weather to set up an encampment, and he

ended by urging La Mouette to keep a watch on 121,5 Mega Hertz to try

and locate the missing life-raft that had broken away during the night.

La Mouette did not acknowledge.

They aren't reading on the VHF/grunted the Trog.

Nick thought briefly of the hapless souls adrift in this cold, and

decided that they would probably not last out the day unless the

temperature rose abruptly. Then he dismissed the thought and

concentrated on the exchanges between Christy Marine and La Mouette.

The two parties had diametrically changed their bargaining standpoints.

While Golden Adventurer was adrift on the open sea, and any salvage

efforts would mean that the tug should merely put a rocket-line across

her, pass a messenger wire to carry the big steel hawser and then take

her in tow, Jules Levoisin had pressed for Lloyd's Open Form 'No cure no

pay contract.

Since the cure was almost certain, pay would follow as a matter of

course. The amount of payment would be fixed by the arbitration of the

committee of Lloyd's in London under the principles of international

maritime law, and would be a percentage of the salved value of the

vessel. The percentage decided upon by the arbitrator would depend upon

the difficulties and dangers that the salvor had overcome. A clever

salvor in an arbitration court could paint a picture of such daring and

ingenuity that the award would be in millions of dollars.

Christy Marine had been desperately trying to avoid a No cure no pay

contract. They had been trying to wheedle I Levoisin into a daily hire

and bonus contract, since this would limit the total cost of the

operation, but they had been met by a Gallic acquisitiveness - right up

to the moment when it became clear that Golden Adventurer had gone

aground.

When that happened, the roles were completely reversed. Jules Levoisin,

with a note of panic in his transmission, had immediately withdrawn his

offer to go Lloyd's Open Form. For now the cure was far from certain,

and the Adventurer might already be a total wreck, beaten to death on

the rocks of Cape Alarm, in which case there would be no pay'.

Now Levoisin was desperately eager to strike a daily hire contract,

including the ran from South America and the ferrying of survivors back

to civilization. He was offering his services at $10,000 a day, plus a

bonus Of 21/2% of any Salved value of the vessel. They were fair terms,

for Jules Levoisin had given up the shining dream of millions and he had

returned to reality.

However, Christy Marine, who had previously been offering a princely sum

for daily hire, had just as rapidly with drawn that offer.

We will accept Lloyd's Open Form, including ferrying of survivors/ they

declared on Channel 16.

Conditions on site have changed/ Jules Levoisin sent back, and the Trog

got another good fix on him.

We are head-reaching on him handsomely/ he Announced with satisfaction,

blinking his pink eyes rapidly while Nick marked the new relative

positions on the chart.

The bridge of Warlock was once again crowded with every officer who had

an excuse to be there. They were all in their working thick blue boiler

suits and heavy sea boots, bulked up with jerseys and balaclava helmets,

and they watched the plot with total fascination, arguing quietly among

themselves.

David Allen came in carrying a bundle of clothing. I've working rig for

you, sir. I borrowed it from the Chief Engineer. You are about the

same size. Does the Chief know? Nick asked.

Not exactly, I just borrowed it from his cabin Well done, David/ Nick

chuckled. Please put it in my day cabin. He felt himself warming more

and more to the younger Captain, sir/ the Trog sang out suddenly. I'm

getting another transmission. It's only strength one, and it's on 121,5

Mega Hertz. Oh, shit! David Allen paused in the entrance to the

Captain's day cabin. Oh, shit! he repeated, and his expression was

stricken. It's that bloody missing life-raft. 'Relative bearing!

snapped Nick angrily.

She bears 2800 relative and 045 magnetic/ the Trog answered instantly,

and Nick felt his anger flare again.

The life-raft was somewhere out on their port beam, eighty degrees off

their direct course to the Golden Adventurer.

The consternation on the bridge was carried in a babble of voices, that

Nick silenced with a single black glance and they stared at the plot in

dismayed hush.

The position of each of the tugs was flagged with a coloured pin and

there was another, a red flag, for the position of the Golden

Adventurer. It was so close ahead of them now, and their lead over La

Mouette so slender, that one of the younger officers could not remain

silent.

If we go to the raft, we'll be handing it to the bloody frog on a plate.

The words ended the restraint and they began to argue again, but in soft

controlled tones. Nick Berg did not look up at them, but remained bowed

over the chart, with his fist on the table-top bunched so fiercely that

the knuckles were ivory white.

Christ, they have probably all had it by now. We'd be throwing it all

away for a bunch of frozen stiffs. There is no telling how far off

course they are, those sets have a range of a hundred miles. La Mouette

will waltz away with it. We could pick them up later - after we put a

line on Golden Adventurer. Nick straightened slowly and took the

cheroot out of his mouth. He looked across at David Allen and spoke

levelly, without change of expression.

Number One, will you please instruct your junior officers in the rule of

the sea. David Allen was silent for a moment, then he answered softly

The preservation of human life at sea takes precedent over all other

considerations. Very well, Mr. Allen/ Nick nodded. Alter 8o to port

and maintain a homing course on the emergency transmission. He turned

away to his cabin. He could control his anger until he was alone, and

then he turned and crashed his fist into the panel above his desk.

Out on the navigation bridge behind him nobody spoke nor moved for fully

thirty seconds, then the Third Officer protested weakly.

But we are so close! David Allen roused himself, and spoke angrily to

the helmsman.

New course 045 magnetic. And as Warlock heeled to the change, he flung

the armful of clothing bitterly on to the chart-table and went to stand

beside the Trog.

Corrections for course to intercept? he asked.

Bring her on to 050V the Trog instructed, and then cackled without

mirth. First you call him an ice-water pisser - now you squeal like a

baby because he answers a Mayday. And David Allen was silent as the

Warlock turned away into the fog, every revolution of her big

variable-pitch propellers carrying her directly away from her prize, and

La Mouette's triumphant transmissions taunted them as the Frenchman

raced across the last of the open water that separated her from Cape

Alarm, bargaining furiously with the owners in London.

The fog seemed so thick that it could be chopped into chunks like

cheese. From the bridge it was not possible to see Warlock's tall bows.

Nick groped his way into it like a blind man in an unfamiliar room, and

all around him the ice pressed closely.

They were in the area of huge tabular icebergs again. The echoes of the

great ice islands flared green and malevolently on the radar screen and

the awful smell and taste of the ice was on every breath they drew.

Radio Officer? Nick asked tensely, without taking his eyes from the

swirling fog curtains ahead.

Still no contact/ the Trog answered, and Nick shuffled on his feet. The

fog had mesmerized him, and he felt the shift of vertigo in his head.

For a moment he had the illusion that his ship was listing heavily to

one side, almost as though it were a space vehicle. He forcibly

rejected the hallucination and stared fixedly ahead, tensing himself for

the first green loom of ice through the fog.

No contact for nearly an hour now/ David muttered beside him.

Either the battery on the DF has run down, or they have snagged ice and

sunk volunteered the Third Officer, raising his voice just enough for

Nick to hear.

or else their transmitter is blanketed by an iceberg/ Nick finished for

him, and there was silence on the bridge for another ten minutes, except

for the quietly requested changes of course that kept Warlock zigzagging

between the unseen but omnipresent icebergs.

All right, Nick made the decision at last. We'll have to accept that

the raft has floundered and break off the search., And there was a stir

of reawakening interest and enthusiasm. Pilot, new course to Golden

Adventurer, please, and we'll increase to fifty percent power. We could

still beat the frog. Again speculation and rising hope buoyed the young

officers. She could run into ice and have to reduce -'They wished

misfortune on La Mouette and her Captain, and even the ship beneath

Nick's feet seemed to regain its lightness and vibrancy as she turned

back for a last desperate run for the prize.

All right, David/ Nick spoke quietly. One thing is certain now, we

aren't going to reach the prize ahead of Levoisin. So we are going to

play our ace now -I he was about to elaborate, when the Trog's voice

squeaked with excitement.

New contact, on 121,5 he cried, and the dismay on the bridge was a

tangible thing.

Christ! said the Third Officer. Why won't they just lie down and die!

The transmission was blanked by that big berg north of us/ the Trog

guessed. They are close now. It won't take long., Just long enough to

make certain we miss the prize,, The berg was so big that it formed its

own weather system about it, causing eddies and currents of both air and

water, enough to stir the fog.

The fog opened like a theatre curtain, and directly ahead there was a

heart-stopping vista of green and blue ice, with darker strata of

glacial mud banding cliffs which disappeared into the higher layers of

fog above as though reaching to the very heavens. The sea had carved

majestic arches of ice and deep caverns from the foot of the cliff.

There they are! Nick snatched the binoculars from the canvas bin and

focused on the dark specks that stood out so clearly against the

backdrop of glowing ice.

No/ he grunted. Fifty emperor penguins formed a bunch on one of the

flat floes, big black birds s nearly as tall as a man's shoulder; even

in the lens, they were deceptively humanoid.

Warlock passed them closely, and with sudden fright they dropped on to

their bellies and used their stubby wings to skid themselves across the

floe, and drop into the still and steaming waters below the cliff. The

floe eddied and swung on the disturbance of Warlock's passing.

Warlock nosed on through solid standing banks of fog and into abrupt

holes of clear air where the mirages and optical illusions of

Antarctica's flawed air maddened them with their inconsistencies,

turning flocks of penguins into herds of elephants or bands of waving

men, and placing in their path phantom rocks and bergs which disappeared

again swiftly as they approached.

The emergency transmissions from the raft faded and silenced, then

beeped again loudly into the silence of the bridge, and seconds later

were silent again.

God damn them/David swore quietly and bitterly, his cheeks pink with

frustration. Where the hell are they?

Why don't they put up a flare or a rocket? And nobody answered as

another white fog monster enveloped the ship, muting all sound aboard

her.

I'd like to try shaking them up with the horn, sir/ he said, as Warlock

burst once more into sparkling and blinding sunlight. Nick grunted

acquiescence without lowering his binoculars.

David reached up for the red-painted foghorn handle above his head, and

the deep booming blast of sound the characteristic voice of an

ocean-going salvage tug, reverberated through the fog, seeming to make

it quiver with the volume of the sound. The echoes came crashing back

off the ice cliffs of the bergs like the thunder of the skies.

Samantha held the solid-fuel. stove in her lap using the detachable

fibreglass lid of the locker as a tray. She was heating half a pint of

water in the Aluminium pannikin, balancing carefully against the

wallowing motion of the raft.

The blue flame of the stove lit the dim cavern of plastic and radiated a

feeble glow of warmth insufficient to sustain life. They were dying

already.

Gavin Stewart held his wife's head against his chest, and bowed his own

silver head over it. She had been dead for nearly two hours now, and

her body had already cooled, the face peaceful and waxen.

Samantha could not bear to look across at them, she crouched over the

stove and dropped a cube of beef into the water, stirring it slowly and

blinking against the tears of penetrating cold. She felt thin watery

mucus run down her nostrils and it required an effort to lift her -arm

and wipe it away on her sleeve. The beef tea was only a little above

blood warmth, but she could not waste ume and fuel on heating it

further.

The metal pannikin passed slowly from mittened hand to numbed and clumsy

hand. They slurped the warm liquid and passed it on reluctantly, though

there were some who had neither the strength nor the interest to take

it.

come on, Mrs. Goldberg, Samantha whispered painfully. The cold seemed to

have closed her throat, and the foul air under the canopy made her head

ache with grinding, throbbing pain. You must drink! Samantha touched

the woman's face, and cut herself off. The flesh had a puttylike

texture and was cooling swiftly. It took long minutes for the shock to

pass, then carefully Samantha pulled the hood of the old woman's parka

down over her face. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were all,

too far sunk into lethargy.

Here/whispered Samantha to the man beside her - and she pressed the

pannikin into his hands, folding his stiff fingers around the metal to

make certain he had hold of it.

drink it before it cools., The air around her seemed to tremble suddenly

with a great burst of sound, like the bellow of a dying bull, or the

rumble of cannon balls across the roof of the sky. For long moments,

Samantha thought her mind was playing tricks with her, and only when it

came again did she raise her head.

Oh God/she whispered. They've come. It's going to be all right.

They've come to save us., She crawled to the locker, slowly and stiffly

as an old woman.

They've come. It's all right, gang, it's going to be all right/ she

mumbled, and she lit the globe on her Mejacket. In its pale glow, she

found the packet of phosphorus flares.

Come on now, gang. Let's hear it for Number 16. She tried to rouse

them as she struggled with the fastenings of the canopy. One more

cheer/ she whispered, but they were still and unresponsive, and as she

fumbled her way out into the freezing fog, the tears that ran down her

cheeks were not from the cold.

She looked up uncomprehendingly, it seemed that from the sky around her

tumbled gigantic cascades of ice, sheer sheets of translucent menacing

green ice. It took her moments to realize that the life raft had

drifted in close beneath the precipitous lee of a tabular berg. She

felt tiny and inconsequential beneath that ponderous mountain of brittle

glassy ice.

For what seemed an eternity, she stood, with her face lifted, staring

upwards -.then again the air resonated with the deep gut-shaking bellow

of the siren. It filled the swirling fog-banks with solid sound that

struck the cliff of ice above her and shattered into booming echoes,

that bounded from wall to wall and rang through the icy caverns and

crevices that split the surface of the great berg.

Samantha held aloft one of the phosphorus flares, and it required all

the strength of her frozen arm to rip the igniter tab. The flare

spluttered and streamed acrid white smoke, then burst into the dazzling

crimson fire that denotes distress at sea. She stood like a tiny statue

of liberty, holding the flare aloft in one hand and peering with

streaming eyes into the sullen fog-banks.

Again the animal bellow of the siren boomed through the milky, frosted

air; it was so close that it shook Samantha's body the way the wind

moves the wheat on the hillside, then it went on to collide solidly with

the cliff of ice that hung above her.

The working of sea and wind, and the natural erosion of chancing

temperatures had set tremendous forces at work within the glittering

body of the berg. Those forces had found a weak point, a vertical fault

line, that ran like an axe-stroke from the flattened tableland of the

summit, five hundred feet down to the moulded bottom of the berg far

below the surface.

The booming sound waves of Warlock's horn found a sympathetic resonance

with the body of the mountain that set the ice on each side of the fault

vibrating in different frequencies.

Then the fault sheared, with a brittle cracking explosion of glass

bursting under pressure, and the fault opened. One hundred million tons

of ice began to move as it broke away from the mother berg. The block

of ice that the berg calved was in itself a mountain, a slab of solid

ice twice the size of Saint Paul's cathedral - and as it swung out and

twisted free, new pressures and forces came into play within it, finding

smaller faults and flaws so that ice burst within ice and tore itself

apart, as though dynamited with tons of high explosive.

The air itself was filled with hurtling ice, some pieces the size of a

locomotive and others as and as sharp and as deadly as steel swords; and

below this plunging toppling mass, the tiny yellow plastic raft bobbed

helplessly.

There/ called Nick. On the starboard beam. The phosphorus distress

flare lit the fog-banks internally with a fiery cherry red and threw

grotesque patterns of light against the belly of lurking cloud. David

Allen blew one last triumphant blast on the siren.

New heading 5 ,1, Nick told the helmsman and Warlock came around

handily, and almost instantly burst from the enveloping bank of fog into

another -arena of open air.

Half a mile away, the life-raft bobbed like a fat yellow toad beneath a

glassy green wall of ice. The top of the iceberg was lost in the fog

high above, and the tiny human figure that stood erect on the raft and

held aloft the brilliant crunson flue was an insignificant speck in this

vast wilderness of fog and sea and ice. .

Prepare to pick up survivors, David/ said Nick, and the mate hurried

away while Nick moved to the wing of the bridge from where he could

watch the rescue.

Suddenly Nick stopped and lifted his head in bewilderment. For a moment

he thought it was gunfire, then the explosive crackling of sound changed

to a rending shriek as of the tearing of living fibre when a giant

redwood tree is falling to the axes. The volume of sound mounted into a

rumbling roar, the unmistakeable roar of a mountain in avalanche.

Good Christ! whispered Nick, as he saw the cliff of ice begin to change

shape. Slowly sagging outwards, it seemed to fold down upon itself.

Faster and still faster it fell, and the hissing splinters of bursting

ice formed a dense swirling cloud, while the cliff leaned further and

further beyond its point of equilibrium and at last collapsed and lifted

pressure waves from the green waters that raced out one behind the

other, flinging Warlock's bows high as she rode them and then nosed down

into the troughs between.

Since Nick's oath, nobody had spoken on the bridge.

They clutched for balance at the nearest support and stared in awe at

that incredible display of careless might, while the water still churned

and creamed with the disturbance and pieces of broken jagged ice, some

the size of a country house, bobbed to the surface and revolved slowly,

finding their balance as they swirled and bumped against each other.

Closer/ snapped Nick. Get as close as you can. Of - the yellow

life-raft there was no longer any sign.

jagged shards of ice had ripped open its fragile skin and the grinding,

tumbling lumps had trodden it and its pitiful human cargo deep beneath

the surface.

Closer, urged Nick. If by a miracle anybody had survived that

avalanche, then they had four minutes left of life, and Nick pushed

Warlock into the still rolling and broiling mass of broken ice - pushing

it open with ice strengthened bows.

Nick flung open the bridge doors beside him and stepped out into the

freezing air of the open wing. He ignored the cold, buoyed up by new

anger and frustration. He had paid the highest price to make this

rescue, he had given up his chance at Golden Adventurer for the lives of

a handful of strangers, and now at this last moment, they had been

snatched away from him. His sacrifice had been in vain, and the

terrible waste of it all appalled him. Because there was no other

outlet for his feelings, he let waves of anger sweep over him and he

shouted at David Allen's little group on the fore-dec.

Keep your eyes open. I want those people! Red caught his eye, a flash

of vivid red, seen through the green water, becoming brighter and more

hectic as it rose to the surface.

Both engines half astern, he screamed. And Warlock stopped dead as the

twin propellers changed pitch and bit into the water, pulling her up in

less than her own length.

in a small open area of green water the red object broke out.

Nick saw a human head in a red anorak hood, supported by the thick

inflated life-jacket. The head was thrown back, exposing a face as

white and glistening with wetness as the deadly ice that surrounded it.

The face was that of a young boy, smooth and beardless, and quite

incredibly beautiful.

Get him! Nick yelled, and at the sound of his voice the eyes in that

beautiful face opened. Nick saw they were a musty green and unnaturally

large in the, glistening pale oval framed by the crimson hood.

David Allen was racing back, carrying life-ring and line.

Hurry. God damn you., The boy was still alive, and Nick wanted him. He

wanted him as fiercely as he had wanted anything in his life, he wanted

at least this one young life in return for all he had sacrificed. He

saw that the boy was watching him. Come on, David/ he shouted Here!

called David, bracing himself at the ship's rail and he threw the

life-ring. He threw it with an expert round arm motion that sent it

skimming forty feet to where the hooded head bobbed on the agitated

water. He threw it so accurately that it hit the bobbing figure a

glancing blow on the shoulder and then plopped into the water alongside,

almost nudging the boy.

Grab it! yelled Nick. Grab hold! The face turned slowly, and the boy

lifted a gloved hand clear of the surface, but the movement was

uncoordinated.

here. It's A& next to you/ David encouraged. Grab it, man! The boy had

been in the water for almost two minutes already, he had lost control of

his body and limbs, he made two inconclusive movements with the raised

hand, one actually bumped the ring but he could not hold it and slowly

the life-ring bobbed away from him.

You bloody idiot/ stormed Nick. Grab it, And those huge green eyes

turned back to him, looking up at him with the total resignation of

defeat, one stiff arm still raised - almost a farewell salute.

Nick did not realize what he was going to do until he had shrugged off

his coat and kicked away his shoes; then he realized that if he stopped

to think about it, he would not go.

He jumped feet first, throwing himself far out to miss the rail below

him, and as the water closed over his head he experienced a terrified

sense of disbelief at the cold.

It seized his chest in a vice that choked the air from his lungs, it

drove needles of agony deep into his forehead, and blinded him with the

pain as he rose to the surface The cold rushed through his light

closing, it crushed his testicles and his stomach was filled with

nausea. The marrow in the bones of his legs and arms ached so that he

found it difficult to force his limbs to respond, but he struck out for

the floating figure.

It was only forty feet, but halfway there he was seized by a panic that

he was not going to make it. He clenched his teeth and fought the icy

water as though it was a mortal enemy, but it sapped away his strength

with the heat of his body.

He struck the floating figure with one outflung before he realized he

had reached him, and he clung desperately to him, peering up at

Warlock's deck.

David Allen had retrieved the ring by its line and he threw it again.

The cold had slowed Nick down so that he could not avoid the ring and it

struck him on the forehead, but he felt no pain, there was no feeling in

his face or feet or hands.

The fleeting seconds counted out the life left to them as he struggled

with the inert figure, slowly losing command of his own limbs as he

tried to fit the ring over the boy's body. He did not accomplish it. He

got the boy's head and one arm through, and he knew he could do no more.

Pull/ he screamed in rising panic, and his voice was remote and echoed

strangely in his own ears.

He took a twist of line around his arm, for his fingers could no longer

hold, and he clung with the remains of his strength as they dragged them

in.

jagged ice brushed and snatched at them, but he held the boy with his

free arm.

Pull/he whispered. Oh, for God's sake, pull! And then they were

bumping against Warlock's steel side, were being lifted free of the

water, the twist of line smearing the wet skin from his forearm,

staining his sleeve with blood that was instantly dissolved to pink by

sea water. He felt no pain.

With the other arm, he hung on to the boy, holding him from slipping out

of the life-ring. He did not feel the hands that grabbed at him. There

was no feeling in his legs and he collapsed face forward, but David

caught him before he struck the deck and they hustled him into the

steaming warmth of Angel's galley, his legs dragging behind him.

Are you okay, Skipper? David kept demanding, and when Nick tried to

reply, his jaw was locked in a frozen rictus and great shuddering spasms

shook his whole body.

Get their clothes off/ grated Angel, and, with an easy swing of his

heavily muscled shoulders lifted the boy's body on to the galley table

and laid it out face upwards.

With a single sweep of a Solingen steel butcher's knife he split the

crimson anorak from neck to crutch and stripped it away.

Nick found his voice, it was ragged and broken by the convulsions of

frozen muscles.

What the hell are you doing, David? Get your arse on deck and get this

ship on course for Golden Adventurer/ he grated, and would have added

something a little more forceful, but the next convulsion caught him,

and anyway David Allen had already left.

You'll be all right. Angel did not even glance up at Nick as he worked

with the knife, ripping away layer after layer of the boy's clothing. A

tough old dog like you - but I think we've got a ripe case of

hypothermia here. Two of the seamen were helping Nick out of his sodden

clothing, the cloth crackled with the thin film of ice that had already

formed. Nick winced with the pain of returning circulation to

half-frozen hands and feet.

Okay/ he said, standing naked in the middle of the galley and scrubbing

at himself with a rough towel. I'll be all right now, return to your

stations. He crossed to the kitchen range, tottering like a drunk, and

welcomed the blast of heat from it, rubbing warmth into himself, still

shaking and shuddering, his body mottled puce and purple with cold and

his genitals shrunken and drawn up into the dense black bush at his

crotch.

Coffee's boiling. Get yourself a hot drink, Skip/ Angel told him,

glancing up at Nick from his work. He ran a quick appreciative glance

over Nick's body, taking in the wide rangy shoulders, the dark curls of

damp hair that covered his chest, and the trim lines of hard muscle that

moulded his belly and waist.

Put lots of sugar in it - it will warm you the best possible way/ Angel

instructed him, and returned his attention to the slim young body on the

table.

Angel had put aside his camp airs, and worked with the brusque

efficiency of a man who had been trained at his task.

Then suddenly he stopped and stood back for a moment.

Would you believe! No fun gun! Angel sighed.

Nick turned just as Angel spread a thick woollen blanket over the pale

naked body on the table and began to massage it vigorously.

You better leave us girls alone together, Skipper/ said Angel with a

sweet smile and a twinkle of his diamond earrings, and Nick was left

with the memory of a single fleeting glimpse of the stunningly lovely

body of a young woman below the pale face and the thick sodden head of

copper and gold hair.

Nick Berg was swaddled in a grey woollen blanket, over the boiler suit

and bulk jerseys. His feet were in thick Norwegian trawlerman's socks

and heavy rubber working boots. He held a china mug of almost boiling

coffee in both hands, bending over it to savour the aroma of the steam.

It was the third cup he had drunk in the last hour - and yet the

shivering spasms still shook him every few minutes.

David Allen had moved his canvas chair across the bridge so he could

watch the Trog and work the ship at the same time. Nick could see the

loom of the black rock cliffs of Cape Alarm close on their port beam.

The morse beam squealed suddenly, a long sequence of code to which every

man on the bridge listened with complete attention, but it needed the

Trog to say it for them.

La Mouette has reached the prize. He seemed to take a perverse relish

in seeing their expressions. She's beaten us to it, lads.

salvage to her crew I want it word for word, snapped Nick irritably,

-and the Trog grinned spitefully at him before bowing over his pad.

La Mouette to Christy Marine. Golden Adventurer is hard aground, held

by ice and receding tides. Stop. Ice damage to plating appears to be

below surface. Stop. Hull is flooded and open to sea. Stop.

Under no circumstances will Lloyd's Open Form be acceptable. Emphasize

importance of beginning salvage work immediately. Stop. Worsening

weather and sea conditions. My final hire offer of $8000 per day them

plus .21/2% of salvaged value open until 1435 GMT. Standing by. Nick

lit one of his cheroots and irrelevantly decided he must conserve them

in future. He had opened his last box that morning. He frowned through

the blue smoke and pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders.

Jules Levoisin was playing it touch and hard now. He was dictating

terms and setting ultimatums. Nick's own policy of silence was paying

off . Probably by now, Jules felt completely safe that he was the only

salvage tug within two thousand miles, and he was holding a big-calibre

gun to Christy Marine's head.

Jules had seen the situation of the Golden Adventurer's hull. If he had

been certain of effecting salvage - no, even if there had been a

fifty-fifty chance of a good salvage, Jules would have gone Open Form.

So Jules was not happy with his chances, and he had the shrewdest and

most appraising eye in the salvage business.

It was a tough- one then. Golden Adventurer was probably held fast by

the quicksand effect of beach and ice, and La Mouette could build up a

mere nine thousand horse-power.

It would mean throwing out ground-tackle, putting power on Adventurer's

pumps - the problems and solutions passed in review through Nick's mind.

It was going to be a tough one, but Warlock had twenty-two thousand

rated horse-power and a dozen other high cards.

He glanced at his gold Rolex Oyster, and he saw that Jules had set a

two-hour ultimatum.

Radio Officer/ he said quietly, and every man on the bridge stiffened

and swayed closer, so as not to miss a word.

Open the telex line direct to Christy Marine, London, and send quote

"Personal for Duncan Alexander from Nicholas Berg Master of Warlock.

Stop. I will be alongside Golden Adventurer in one hour forty minutes.

Stop. I make firm offer Lloyd's Open Form Contract Salvage. Stop.

Offer closes 1300 GMT". The Trog looked up at him startled, and blinked

his pink eyes swiftly.

Read it back/ snapped Nick, and the Trog did it in a high penetrating

voice and when he finished, waited quizzically, as if expecting Nick to

cancel.

Send it/ said Nick, and rose to his feet. Mr. Allen, he turned to

David, I want you and the Chief Engineer in MY day cabin right away. The

buzz of excitement and speculation began before Nick had closed the door

behind him.

David knocked and followed him three minutes later, and Nick looked up

from the notes he was making.

What are they saying? Nick asked. That I am crazy? They're just kids/

shrugged David. What do they know? They know plenty, and they're

right. I am crazy to go Open Form on a site unseen! But it's the

craziness of a man with no other option. Sit down, David.

When I made the decision to leave Cape Town on the chance of this job -

that was when I did the crazy thing., Nick could no longer keep the

steely silence. He had to say it, to talk it out. I was throwing dice

for my whole bundle. When I turned down the Esso tow, that was when I

went on the line for the whole company, Warlock and her sister the whole

thing depended on the cash from the Esso tow I see/ muttered David, and

his colour was pink and high, embarrassed by this confidence from Nick

Berg.

What I am doing now is risking nothing. If I lose now, if I fail to

pull Golden Adventurer out of there, I have lost nothing that is not

already forfeit. We could have offered daily hire at a better rate than

La Mouette, David suggested.

No. Duncan Alexander is my enemy. The only way I can get the contract

is to make it so attractive, that he has no alternative. If he refuses

my offer of Open Form, I will take him up before Lloyd's Committee and

his own shareholders. I will make a rope of his own guts and hoist it

around his neck. He has to go with me - whereas, if I had offered daily

hire at a few thousand dollars less than La Mouette. Nick broke off,

reached for the box of cheroots on the corner of his desk, then arrested

the gesture and swivelled in his chair at the heavy knock on the cabin

door.

Come! Vin Baker's overalls were pristine blue, but the bandage around