“Treat me gently, Kramer. I’m your meal-ticket. Remember it.”
Hugo gaped at him. The positions had reversed so swiftly.
He pulled himself upright and his voice was thick with agony, but humble.
“I’m sorry, Mr. van der Byl, I lost my temper. It’s been a hell of a-“
“Skipper! Ahead!” The warning was shouted by the coloured crewman, Hansie.
Hugo stumbled to the untended wheel, and peered out into t he storm.
Wild Goose was shooting down another slope of green water, and just ahead of her bows Hugo saw one of the huge yellow buoys that
Kingfisher had laid down and then abandoned. It was held captive in the trough of the swells by the anchor cable. The cable was drawn as tight as a rod of steel across the trawler’s bows, lifted just above the surface of the water; shivering drops of water flew from it under the tension of the buoy’s drag.
“Oh God!” Hugo spun the wheel and threw Wild Goose’s engine into reverse but she was racing down the swell, and her speed was unchecked as the cable scraped harshly along her keel.
Then came the harsh banging and clattering of the drive shaft as the cable fouled the propeller - followed by a crack as the shaft snapped. Wild Goose’s engine screamed into overrev as the load was lifted from it.
Hugo shut the throttle, and there was silence in the wheelhouse.
Wild Goose swung beam on to the seas which came boiling in over her deck. Without her propeller she was transformed from a husky little sea creature to a piece of driftwood at the mercy of each current and the whim of the wind.
Hugo’s head swung slowly until he was looking downwind to where the massive shapes of Thunderbolt and Suicide just showed through the rain squall.
Cover your ears - tight!” Johnny Lance pressed Tracey against the bulkhead as far from the cyclone room as they could get. “There are twenty-five pounds of plastique in there - it will blow like a volcano.
He will have used short fuse, fourteen minutes.“We won’t have long to wait.” Johnny set Tracey’s shoulders squarely against the steel plating and crouched over her - trying to shield her with his own body.
They stared into each other’s eyes, teeth clenched, the heels of their palms jammed hard over their ears and they cowered away from the blast that must come.
The minutes passed, the longest minutes of Tracey’s life.
She could not have borne them without screaming hysteria except for that big hard body covering her. - even with it she felt her fear mounting steadily during the molasses drip of time.
Suddenly the air lunged at her, driving the breath from her lungs.
Johnny was thrown heavily against her. The blast sucked at her eardrums, and burst in her head so that bright lights flashed across her vision and she felt the steel plates heave under her shoulders.
Then her head cleared, and although her eardrums buzzed and sang, she found with a leaping relief that she was still alive.
She reached out for Johnny, but he was gone. In panic she groped, then opened her eyes. He was lurching down the long conveyor room, and when he reached the locked door at the far end he pressed his face to the peephole.
The fumes of the explosion still filled the cyclone room, a swirling bluish fog, but through them Johnny could make out the shambles that was the aftermath.
The huge cyclone had been torn from its mountings, and now sagged against the far bulkhead - crushed. It was worth only a single glance before Johnny froze into rigidity at the true horror.
The gravel pipe had been severed cleanly just below its juncture with the upper deck. It protruded for six feet, but now the force of the jet through it was flicking and whipping it about as though it were not steel but a rubber garden hose.
The jet was a solid eighteen-inch column, a pillar of brown mud and yellow gravel and sea water that beat against the steel plates of the hull with a hollow drumming roar.
In the few seconds since the explosion the cyclone room was already half-filled with a slimy shifting porridge that rushed from wall to wall with the movement of the ship. It was like some monstrous jelly fish which each second gathered weight and strength.
Tracey reached Johnny’s side and he placed his arm around her shoulders. She looked through the armoured glass and he felt her body stiffen.
At that moment the yellow monster spread over the window, obscuring it completely. Johnny felt the first straining of the steel plates under his hands. They fluttered and bulged, then began to protest aloud at the intolerable pressure. A seam started, and a fine jet of filthy water hissed from the gap and soaked icily through
Johnny’s jersey.
“Get back.“Johnny dragged Tracey away from the squeaking, groaning bulkhead. Back along the narrow conveyor room they stumbled, moving with difficulty for the deck beneath their feet was slanting as Kingfisher began to lean under the increasing weight in her belly.
Still holding Tracey, he reached the locked door and resisted the futile desire to attack it with his bare hands.
Instead he forced his brain to work, tried to anticipate the sequence of events that would lead to the final destruction of
Kingfisher - and all those aboard her.
Benedict had left the other entrance to the cyclone room wide open. Already that viscous mass of mud and water must be spreading rapidly through the lower levels of the hull, following always the avenue of least resistance finding the weak spots and bursting through them.
If the walls of the conveyor room held against the pressure, the rest of the hull would be filled and they would be enfolded in the tentacles of that great yellow monster a small bubble of air trapped within it and taken down with it when it returned to the depths from which it had come.
Would the bulkheads of the conveyor room hold? The answer came almost immediately in the squeal of metal against metal, and the crackle of springing rivets.
The monster had found the weak spot, the aperture through the drying furnace into the conveyor, ripping away the fragile baffles, bursting through the furnace in a cloud of Steam, it gushed into the conveyor room bringing with it the sewage stench of deep-sea mud.
Kingfisher made another sluggish roll, so different from her usual spry action, and the mud came racing down the tunnel in a solid knee-high wall.
It slammed both of them back against the steel door with a shocking strength, and the feel of it was cold and loathsome as something long dead and putrefied.
Kingfisher rolled back and the mud slithered away, bunched itself against the far bulkhead then charged at them again.
Waist-deep it struck them, and tried to suck them back with the next roll.
Tracey was screaming now, nerves and muscles reaching their breaking-point. She was clinging to Johnny, coated to the waist in stinking ooze, her eyes and mouth wide open in terror as she watched the mud building up for its next assault.
Johnny groped for some hold to anchor them. They must keep on their feet to survive that next rush of mud. He found the locking handle of the door and braced himself against it, holding Tracey with all his strength.
The mud came again, silently, murderously. It burst over their heads and punched them with stunning force against the plating.
Then it sucked back once more, and left them down on their knees, anchored only by Johnny’s grip on the locking handle.
Tracey was vomiting the foul mud and it filled her ears and eyes and nostrils, clogging them so that it bubbled at her breathing.
Johnny could feel her weakening in his arms, her struggles becoming more feeble as she tried to regain her feet.
His own strength was going. It needed his last reserve to drag them both upright.
The locking handle turned in his fingers, spinning open.
The steel door against which he was braced fell away, so that he staggered backwards without support but
