helmsman to bring her bows round to the wave.
They went up the wave with a gut-swooping rush that threw them down on
to the floorboards of the half-flooded work boat, and then crashed over
the crest.
Behind them the wave slogged into Golden Adventurer's stern, and shot up
it with an explosion of white and furious water that turned to white
driven spray in the wind.
The helmsman already had the work boat pushing heavily through the
pack-ice, back towards the waiting Warlock.
Stop/Nick signalled him. Back up.
Already he was struggling out of his hood and oilskins, as he staggered
back to the stern.
He shouted in the helmsman's face, I'm going down to check/ and he saw
the disbelieving, almost pleading, expression on the man's face.
He wanted to get out of there now, back to the safety of Warlock, but
relentlessly Nick resettled the diving helmet and connected his air
hose.
The collision mat was floating hard against Golden Adventurer's side,
buoyant with trapped air among the mass of wiry fibre.
Nick positioned himself beneath it twenty feet from the maelstrom
created by the gashed steel.
It took him only a few seconds to ensure that the cable was free, and he
blessed Beauty Baker silently for stopping the winch immediately it had
pulled the mat free of the work boat. Now he could direct the final
task.
She's looking good,, he told Baker. But take her up slowly, fifty feet
a minute on the winch. Fifty feet, it is! Baker confirmed.
And slowly the bobbing mat was drawn down below the surface.
Good, keep it at that. It was like pressing a field-dressing into an
open bleeding wound. The outside pressure of water drove it deep into
the gash, while from the inside the two-inch cable plugged it deeper
into place. The wound was staunched almost instantly and Nick finned
down, and swam carefully over it.
The deadly suck and blow of high pressure through the gap was killed
now, and he detected only the lightest movement of water around the
edges of the mat; but the oakum fibres would swell now they were
submerged and, within hours the plug would be watertight.
It's done/ said Nick into his microphone. Hold a twenty-ton pull on the
cable - and you can start your pumps and suck the bitch clean. It was a
measure of his stress and relief and fatigue that Nick called that
beautiful ship a bitch, and he regretted the word as it was spoken.
Nick craved sleep, every nerve, every muscle shrieked for surcease, and
in his bathroom mirror his eyes were inflamed, angry with salt and wind
and cold; the smears of exhaustion that underlined them were as lurid as
the fresh bruises and abrasions that covered his shoulders and thighs
and ribs.
His hands shook in a mild palsy with the need for rest and his legs
could hardly carry him as he forced himself back to Warlock's navigation
bridge.
Congratulations, sir/ said David Allen, and his admiration was
