his lips as he lifted his face to it.
The glass of the bridge windows wavered and swam as they began to melt -
and then abruptly there was no more oxygen. The fireball had
extinguished itself, consumed everything in its twenty seconds of life,
everything from sea level to thirty thousand feet above it, a brief and
devastating orgasm of destruction.
It left a vacuum, a weak spot in the earth's thin skin of air, it formed
another low pressure system smaller, but much more intense, and more
hungry to be filled than the eye of hurricane Lorna itself.
It literally tore the guts out of that great revolving storm, setting up
counter winds and a vortex within the established system that ripped it
apart.
New gales blew from every Point about the fireball's vacuum, swiftly
beginning their own dervish spirals and twenty miles short of the
mainland of Florida, hurricane Lorna checked her mindless, blundering
charge, fell in upon herself and disintegrated into fifty different
willy.
nilly squalls and whirlpools of air that collided and split again,
slowly degenerating into nothingness.
On a morning in April in Galveston roads, the salvage tug Sea Witch
dropped off tow to four smaller harbour tugs who would take the Golden
Dawn No. 3 Pod tank up the narrows to the Orient Amex discharge
installation below Houston.
Her sister ship Warlock, Captain David Allen Commanding, had dropped off
his tandem tow of No. 1 and No. .2 pod tanks to the same tugs
forty-eight hours previously.
Between the two ships, they had made good salvage under Lloyd's Open
Form of three-quarters of a million tons of crude petroleum valued at
$85-50 U.S. a ton. To d the value of the three tanks the prize would
be added themselves - not less than sixty-five million dollars all told,
Nicholas calculated, and he owned both ships and the full share of the
salvage award. He had not sold to the Shiekhs yet, though for every day
of the tow from Florida Straites to Texas there had been frantic telex
messages from James Teacher in London. The Sheikhs were desperate to
sign now, but Nicholas would let them wait a little longer.
Nicholas stood on the open wing of Sea Witch's bridge and watched the
four smaller harbour tugs bustling importantly about their ungainly
charge.
He lifted the cheroot to his lips carefully, for they were still
blistered from the heat of the fireball - and he pondered the question
of how much he had achieved, apart from spectacular riches.
He had reduced the spill from a million to a quarter of a million tons
of cad-rich crude, and he had burned it in a fireball. Nevertheless,
there had been losses, toxins had been lifted high above the fireball.
They had spread and settled across Florida as far as Tampa and
Tallahassee, poisoning the pastures and killing thousands of head of
domestic stock. But the American authorities had been quick to extend
the hurricane emergency procedures.
There had been no loss of human life. He had achieved that much.
Now he had delivered the salvaged pod tanks to Orient Amex. The new
