Hungry as the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    “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.
    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 of the next swell. But he knew 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