Salvage for the Saint Read Online Free PDF

Saint.
    Vic Cullen was a boatbuilder from Bursledon, across the Solent. After thirty years’ working with boats, on and off the water, there wasn’t much anybody could teach him on the subject. He had built the Privateer virtually single-handed to a design he and Simon had worked out together. His only help with the work had come from the Saint himself in the odd intervals of his exigent adventures elsewhere.
    The teams of scrutineers were busy with their final inspections, and the salt breeze carried a low babble of voices from the waiting competitors, punctuated intermittently by the raucously variegated notes of motors starting up. Beneath that man-made and evanescent hubbub was something powerful and eternal—the rhythmical slap and swell of the sea. Even here against the harbour wall its motion was noticeably stronger than it had been in the last few days, and as Simon and Vic neared the short jetty where the Privateer was moored they could see her scarlet hull bobbing up and down impatiently, and hear the stretched creaking of wet rope as she tugged at her moorings.
    “Strainin’ at the leash, look,” Vic said with pride; and the Saint nodded and smiled, sharing that same pride.
    “Scrutineers should be with us in a few minutes,” he said. “She’ll just have to contain herself till they’ve done.”
    This was her first race; and it was for racing above all that this trim compact boat had been built. She was every inch a beauty; but it was the beauty of a spare and functional design. Every line of that sleek hull, from the futuristically cutaway stern to the streamlined cockpit canopy and steeply raked bow, had been calculated for speed. She was a thoroughbred racing machine, a slim-line twenty-two-foot lightweight with a modest five litres of engine and with the irreducible minimum of fittings and frivolities allowable within the race rules, which in those days were not over-elaborate.
    Those days were, roughly speaking, the beginning of the modern revivalist era of powerboating competition, before the introduction of more rigid systems of boat classi-fication and qualification. Less than midway through the twentieth century, the sport had been enthusiastically rediscovered after a lengthy neglect, and its free-for-all freshness attracted a colourfully wide range of hopefuls.
    The Cowes-to-Penzance race that year was a typical result; but the record books will be found to be mysteriously obscure on the subject if not altogether blank. The fact is, nevertheless, that there were thirty-six entrants in all: thirty-six assorted boats receiving the scrutineer’s final check on that windy August morning.
    The degree of assortedness was astonishing. Simon Templar had cast an incredulous eye over many of them, and had decided that the owners’ choice of names for their boats offered a rough and ready indication of their chances.
    Those blazoned with the most intimidating appellations—Thundershark, Tornado, Hell for Leather and the like—mostly turned out to be the tiny, infinitely hopeful outboarders. At the other extreme were the half dozen big thirty-five- and forty-footers representing the brute force approach: plenty of bulk and up to a thousand horses of petrol or diesel power to blast it across the waves. For some reason, maybe connected with having a faulty sense of humour, the proud owners of these jumbo-size entries tended to have given them coy names like Buckaboo, entered by Sammy Topwith of motor racing fame, Big Bouncie, a fancied US contender, and Skimmie, the great hope of the Aussies.
    Somewhere in among this litter of the inept and the overpowered was the gold of real racing, boats built for the job and handled by men who knew what it took and had what it took. The names in this group had a romantic flavour that suggested their clean graceful lines: Dolphin II, Red Marlin, Silver Lady, the crack Italian boat Bellis-sima—and Simon Templar’s Privateer.
    Moored near the Privateer was Charles