handling his ship and its burdensome tow, but now there was time and
energy for one thing only.
The air stank. The heavy fumes of crude oil burned pumping lungs, and
constricted his throat. He Nicholas coughed and gasped as he ran, the
taste and reek of it coated his tongue and seared his nostrils.
Below the catwalk, the bloated pod-tank was punctured in a hundred
places by the steel lances of the disintegrating hull, pinched and torn
by moving steel girders, and the dark red oil spurted and dribbled and
oozed from it like the blood from the carcass of a mortally wounded
poisonous dragon.
Nicholas reached the stern tower, barged in through the storm doors to
the lowest deck and reached the pump control room.
Duncan Alexander turned to him, as he entered, his face swollen and
bruised where Nicholas had beaten him.
We are abandoning now/ said Nicholas. Sea Witch is taking us off. I
hated you from that very first day/ Duncan was very calm, very
controlled, his voice even, deep and cultured.
Did you know that! There's no time for that now. Nicholas grabbed his
arm, and Duncan followed him readily into the passageway.
That's what the game is all about, isn't it, Nicholas, power and wealth
and women - that's the game we played. Nicholas was barely listening.
They were out on to the quarter-deck, standing at its starboard rail,
below the bridge, the pick-up point that Jules had stipulated. Sea
Witch was turning in, only five hundred yards out, and Nicholas had time
now to watch Jules handle his ship.
He was running out the heavy tow-cable on free spool, deliberately
letting a long bight of it form between the tug and its enormous
whalelike burden, and he was using the slack in the cable to cut in
towards Golden Dawn's battered, sagging hulk. He would be alongside for
the pickup in less than a minute.
That was the game we played, you and I, Duncan was still talking calmly.
Power and wealth and women Below them Golden Dawn poured her substance
into the sea in a slick, stinking flood. The waves, battering against
her side, churned the oil to a thick filthy emulsion, and it was
spreading away across the surface, bleeding its deadly poison into the
Gulf Stream to broadcast it to the entire ocean.
I won/ Duncan went on reasonably. I won it all, every time - He was
groping in his pockets, but Nicholas hardly heard him, was not watching
him. - until now.
Duncan took one of the self-igniting signal flares from his pocket and
held it against his chest with both hands, slipping his index finger
through the metal ring of the igniter tab.
And yet I win this one also, Nicholas/ he said. Game, set and match.
And he pulled the tab on the flare with a sharp jerk, and stepped back,
holding it aloft.
It spluttered once and then burst into brilliant sparkling red flame,
white phosphorescent smoke billowing from it.
Now at last Nicholas turned to face him, and for a moment he was too
appalled to move. Then he lunged for Duncan's raised hand that held the
burning flare, but Duncan was too fast for him to reach it.
