Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

he gasped like a drowning man. He felt tears streaming from his eyes across his cheeks and the frozen spray struck into his face like steel darts.
    Carefully he filled his lungs, and his nostrils flared as he smelt the ice. It was that unrnistakeable dank smell, he remembered so well from the northern Arctic seas. It was like the body smell of some gigantic reptilian sea monster and it struck the mariner’s chill into his soul. He could endure only a few seconds more of the gale, but when he stepped back into the cosy green-lit warmth of the bridge, his mind was clear, and he was thinking crisply.
    “Mr. Allen, there is ice ahead.”
    “I have a watch on the radar, sir.”
    “Very good,” Nick nodded, “but we’ll reduce to fifty percent of power.” He hesitated, and then went on, “and maintain radio silence.” The decision was hard made, and Nick saw the accusation in David Allen’s eyes before he turned away to give the orders for the reduction in power. Nick felt a sudden and uncharacteristic urge to explain the decision to him. He did not know why – perhaps he needed the Mate’s understanding and sympathy.
    Instantly Nick saw that as a symptom of his weakness and vulnerability. He had never needed sympathy before, and he steeled himself against it now. His decision to maintain radio silence was correct. He was dealing with two hard men. He knew he could not afford to give an inch of sea room to Jules Levoisin. He would force him to open radio contact first. He needed that advantage.
    The other man with whom he had to deal was Duncan Alexander, and he was a hating man, dangerous and vindictive. He had tried once to destroy nick - and perhaps he had already succeeded. Nick had to guard himself now, he must pick with care his moment to open negotiations with Christy marine and the man who had displaced him at its head. Nick must be in a position of utmost strength when he did so.
    Jules Levoisin must be forced to declare himself first, Nick decided.
    The Captain of the Golden Adventurer would have to be left in the agonies of doubt a little longer, and Nick consoled himself with the thought that any further drastic change in the liner’s circumstances or a decision by the Master to abandon his ship and commit his company to the lifeboats would be announced on the open radio channels and would give him a chance to intervene.
    Nick was about to caution the Trog to keep a particular watch on Channel 16 for La Mouette ‘s first transmission, then he checked himself. That was another thing he never did — issue unnecessary orders. The Trog’s grey wrinkled head was wreathed in clouds of reeking cigar smoke but was bowed to his mass of electronic equipment, and he adjusted a dial with careful lover’s fingers; his little eyes were bright and sleepless as those of an ancient sea turtle.
    Nick went to his chair and settled down to wait out the few remaining hours of the short Antarctic summer night.
    The radar screen had shown strange and alien capes and headlands above the sea clutter of the storm, strange islands, anomalies which did not relate to the Admiralty charts. Between these alien masses shone myriad other smaller contacts, bright as fireflies, any one of which could have been the echo of a stricken ocean liner — but which was not.
    As Warlock nosed cautiously down into this enchanted sea, the dawn that had never been far from the horizon flushed out, timorous as a bride, decked in colours of gold and pink that struck splendorous splinters of light off the icebergs. The horizon ahead of them was cluttered with ice, some of the fragments were but the size of a billiard table and they bumped and scraped down the Warlock‘s side, then swung and bobbed in her wake as she passed. There were others the size of a city block, weird and fanciful structures of honeycombed white ice, that stood as tall as Warlock‘s upperworks as she passed.
    “White ice is soft ice,” Nick murmured to David Allen