Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith Page A

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