They all saw Golden Adventurer's stern swinging to meet the next great
ridge of water as it burst around her.
1: She was floating, and for moments Nick was paralysed by the wonder of
seeing that great and beautiful ship come to life again, become a
living, vital sea creature as she took the seas and rose to meet them.
We've done it, Christ, we've done itV howled Baker, but it was too soon
for self-congratulation. As Golden Adventurer came free of the ground
and gathered sternway under Warlock's tow, so her rudder bit and swung
her tall stern across the wind.
She swung, exposing the enormous windage of her starboard side to the
full force of the storm. It was like setting a main -sail, and the wind
took her down swiftly on the rocky headland with its sentinel columns
that guarded the entrance to the bay.
Nick's first instinct was to try and hold her off, to oppose the force
of the wind directly and he flung Warlock into the task, relying on her
great diesels and the two anchors to keep the liner from going ashore
again - but the wind toyed with them, it ripped the anchors out of the
pebble bottom and Warlock was drawn stern first through the water,
straight down on the jagged rock of the headland.
Chief, get those anchors up/ Nick snapped into the microphone. 'They'll
never hold in this. Twenty years earlier, bathing off a lonely beach in
the Seychelles, Nick had been caught out of his depth by one of those
killer currents that flow around the headlands of oceanic islands, and
it had sped him out into the open sea so that within minutes the
silhouette of the land was low and indistinct on his watery horizon. He
had fought that current, swimming directly against it, and it had nearly
killed him. Only in the last stages of exhaustion had he begun to
think, and instead of battling it, he had ridden the current, angling
slowly across it, using its impetus rather than opposing it.
The lesson he had learned that day was well remembered, and as he
watched Baker bring Golden Adventurer's dripping anchors out of the wild
water he was driving Warlock hard, bringing her around on her cable so
the wind was no longer in her teeth, but over her stern quarter.
Now the wind and Warlock's screws were no longer opposed, but Warlock
was pulling two points off the wind, as fine a course as Nick could
judge barely to clear the most seaward of the rocky sentinels; now the
liner's locked rudder was holding her steady into the wind - but
opposing Warlock's attempt to angle her away from the land.
It was a problem of simple vectors of force, that Nick tried to work out
in his head and prove in physical terms, as he delicately judged the
angle of his tow and the direction of the wind, balancing them against
the tremendous leverage of the liner's locked rudder, the rudder which
was dragging her suicidally down upon the land.
Grimly, he stared ahead to where the black rock cliffs were still hidden
in the white nothingness. They were invisible, but their presence was
recorded on the cluttered screen of the radar repeater. With both wind
and engines driving them, their speed was too high, and if Golden
Adventurer went on to the cliffs like this, her hull would shatter like
a water melon hurled against a brick wall.
It was another five minutes before Nick was absolutely certain they
