There were a few small personal items thrown carelessly on the
leather-bound blotter, a gold money clip holding a mixed sheath of
currency notes, five pounds sterling, fifty US dollars, Deutschmarks and
francs, a gold Rolex Oyster perpetual watch, a gold Dunhill lighter with
a single white diamond set in it, and a billfold of the smoothest finest
calf leather. They described clearly the man who owned them and,
feeling like a thief, she picked up the billfold and opened it.
There were a dozen cards in their little plastic envelopes, American
Express, Diners, Bank American, Carte Blanche, Hertz No. 1, Pan Am VIP
and the rest. But opposite them was a colour photograph. Three people:
a man, Nicholas in a cable-stitch jersey, his face bronzed, his hair
windruffled; a small boy in a yachting jacket with a curly mop of hair
and solemn eyes above a smiling mouth - and a woman. She was probably
one of the most beautiful women Samantha had ever seen, and she closed
the billfold, replaced it carefully, and quietly left the cabin.
David Allen called the Captain's suite for three minutes without an
answer, slapping his open palm on the mahogany chart table with
impatience and staring through the navigation windows at the spectacle
of a world gone mad.
For almost two hours, the wind had blown steadily from the north-west at
a little over thirty knots, and although the big humpy seas still
tumbled into the mouth of the bay, Warlock had ridden them easily, even
connected, as she was, to Golden Adventurer by the main tow-cable.
David had put a messenger over the finer's stern, firing the nylon fine
from a rocket gun, and Baker's men had retrieved the fine and winched
across first the carrier wire and then the main cable itself.
Warlock had let the main cable be drawn out of her by Adventurer's
winches, slowly revolving off the great winch drums in the compartment
under the tug's stern deck, out through the cable ports below the after
navigation bridge where David stood controlling each inch of run and
play with light touches on the controls.
A good man could work that massive cable like a flyfisherman playing a
big salmon in the turbulent water of a mountain torrent, letting it slip
against the clutchplates, or run free, or recover slack, bringing it up
hard and fast under a pull of five hundred tons - or, in dire emergency,
he could hit the shear button, and snip through the flexible steel
fibre, instantaneously relinquishing the tow, possibly saving the tug
itself from being pulled under or being rushed by the vessel it was
towing.
It had taken an hour of delicate work, but now the tow was in place, a
double yoke made fast to Golden Adventurer's main deck bollards, one on
her starboard and one on her port stern quarters.
The yoke was Y-shaped, drooping over the high stern to join at the white
nylon spring, three times the thickness of a man-s thigh and with the
elasticity to absorb sudden shock which might have snapped rigid steel
cable. From the yoke connection, the single main cable looped back to
the tug.
David Allen was lying back a thousand yards from the shore, holding
enough strain on the tow-cable to prevent it sagging to touch and
possibly snag on the unknown bottom. He was holding his station with
