first be at the place where it begins to peak. It's an instinctive
thing, a man just knows where that place is. Nick Berg knew deep in his
being that this was, the place now, and, with his rising strength, he
felt the old excitement, the old I'll show the bastards who is beaten,
excitement, and he dressed swiftly and went up the Master's private
companionway to the Upper deck.
immediately, the wind flew at him and flicked his dark wet hair into his
face. It was force five from the south-east, and it came boiling over
the great flat-topped mountain which crouched above the city and
harbour. Nick looked at it and saw the thick white cloud they called
the table cloth spilling off the heights, and swirling along the grey
rock cliffs.
The Cape of Storms/ he murmured. Even the water in the protected dock
leaped and peaked into white crests which blew away like wisps of smoke.
The tip of Africa thrust southwards into one of the most treacherous
seas on all the globe. Here two oceans swept turbulently together off
the rocky cliffs of Cape Point, and then rolled over the shallows of the
Agulhas bank.
Here wind opposed current in eternal conflict. This was the breeding
ground of the freak wave, the one that mariners called the hundred-year
wave,, because statistically that was how often it should occur.
But off the Agulhas bank, it was always lurking, waiting only for the
right combination of wind and current, waiting for the inphase wave
sequence to send its crest rearing a hundred feet, high and steep as
those grey rock cliffs of Table Mountain itself.
Nick had read the accounts of seamen who had survived that wave, and, at
a loss for words, they had written only of a great hole in the sea into
which a ship fell helplessly.
When the hole closed, the force of breaking water would bury her
completely. Perhaps the Waratah Castle was one which had fallen into
that trough. Nobody would ever know. - a great ship of 9,000 tons
burden, she and her crew of 211 had disappeared without trace in these
seas.
Yet here was one of the busiest sea lanes on the globe, as a procession
of giant tankers ploughed ponderously around that rocky Cape on their
endless shuttle between the Western. world and the oil Gulf of Persia,
Despite their bulk, those supertankers were perhaps some of the most
vulnerable vehicles yet designed by man.
Now Nick turned and looked across the wind-ripped waters of Duncan Dock
at one of them. He could read her name on the stern that rose like a
five-storied apartment block. She was owned by Shell Oil, 250,000 dead
weight tons, and, out of ballast, she showed much of her rust-red
bottom. She was in for repairs, while out in the roadstead of Table
Bay, two other monsters waited patiently for their turn in the hospital
dock.
So big and ponderous and vulnerable - and valuable.
Nick licked his lips involuntarily - hull and cargo together, she was
thirty million dollars, piled up like a mountain.
That was why he had stationed the Warlock here at Cape Town on the
southernmost tip of Africa. He felt the strength and excitement surging
