Алистер Маклин - Seawitch

The armoury was guarded by only two retired naval petty officers, who regarded their job not only as a sinecure but downright nonsense, for who in his right mind would want to steal depth-charges and naval guns? It was their invariable custom to prepare themselves for sleep immediately upon arrival, and asleep they soundly were when Conde and his men entered through the door they hadn’t even bothered to lock.

They used two fork-lift trucks to trundle depth-charges, light, dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns and a sufficiency of shells down to the dockside, then used one of the scores of cranes that lined the dockside to lower the stolen equipment into the hold of the Roamer , which was then battened down. Clearing the customs was the merest formality. The customs officials had seen the Roamer come and go so many times that they had long ago lost count. Besides, no one was going to have the temerity to inspect the ocean-going property of one of the richest men in the world: the Roamer was Lord Worth’s seismological survey vessel.

At its base not far from Havana, a small, conventionally powered and Russian-built submarine slipped its moorings and quietly put out to sea. The hastily assembled but nonetheless hand-picked crew were informed that they were on a training cruise designed to test the sea-going readiness of Castro’s tiny fleet. Not a man aboard believed a word of this.

Meanwhile Cronkite had not been idle. Unlike the others, he had no need to break into any place to obtain explosives. He just had to use his own key. As the world’s top expert in capping blazing gushers he had access to an unlimited number and great variety of explosives. He made a selection of those and had them trucked down from Houston, where he lived – apart from the fact that Houston was the oil rig centre of the south the nature of his business made it essential for him to live within easy reach of an airport with international connections. They were then sent off to Galveston.

As the truck was on its way another seismological vessel, a converted coastguard cutter, was also closing in on Galveston. This vessel, without explaining his reasons why, Cronkite had obtained through the good offices of Durant, who had represented the Galveston area companies at the meeting of the ten at Lake Tahoe. The cutter, which went by the name of Questar , was normally based at Freeport, and Cronkite could quite easily have taken the shipment there, but this would not have suited his purpose. The tanker Crusader was unloading at Galveston and the Crusader was one of the three tankers that plied regularly between the Seawitch and the Gulf ports.

The Questar and Cronkite arrived almost simultaneously. Mulhooney, the Questar ’s skipper, eased his ship into a berth conveniently close to the Crusader. Mulhooney was not the regular captain of the Questar. That gentleman had been so overcome by the sight of two thousand dollars in cash that he had fallen ill, and would remain so for a few days. Cronkite had recommended his friend, Mulhooney. Cronkite didn’t immediately go aboard the Questar. Instead he chatted with the chief customs inspector, who watched with an idle eye as what were obviously explosives were transferred to the Questar. The two men had known each other for years. Apart from observing that someone out in the Gulf had been careless with matches again, the customs official had no further pertinent comment to make.

In response to idle questioning Cronkite learned that the Crusader had just finished offloading its cargo, and would be sailing in approximately one hour.

He boarded the Questar , greeted Mulhooney and went straight to the crew’s mess. Seated among the others there were three divers already fully clad in scuba suits. He gave brief instructions and the three men went on deck. Under cover of the superstructure and on the blind side of the ship – the side remote from the dock – the three men went down a rope ladder and slid quietly into the water. Six objects – radio-detonated magnetic mines equipped with metallic clamps – were lowered down towards them. They were so constructed as to have a very slight negative buoyancy, which made them easy to tow along under water.

In the pre-dawn darkness the hulls of the vessels cast so heavy a shadow from the powerful shorelights that it was virtually certain that the men could have swum unobserved on the surface. But Cronkite was not much given to taking any chances at all. The mines were attached along the stern half of the Crusader ’s hull, thirty feet apart and set at a depth of about ten feet. Five minutes after their departure the scuba divers were back. After a further five minutes the Questar put out to sea.

Cronkite, despite his near-legendary reputation for ruthlessness, had not quite lost touch with humanity: to say that he was possessed of an innate kindliness would have been a distortion of the truth, for he was above all an uncompromising and single-minded realist, but one with no innate killer instinct. Nonetheless, there were two things that would at that moment have given him considerable satisfaction.

The first of these was that he would have preferred to have the Crusader at sea before pressing the sheathed button before him on the bridge. He had no wish that innocent lives should be lost in Galveston, but it was a chance that he had to take. Limpet mines, as the Italian divers had proved in Alexandria in World War Two – and this to the great distress of the Royal Navy – could be devastatingly effective against moored vessels. But what might happen to high buoyancy limpets when a ship got under way and worked its way up to a maximum speed was impossible to forecast, as there was no known case of a vessel under way ever having been destroyed by limpet mines. It was at least possible that water pressure of a ship under way might well overcome the tenuous magnetic hold of the limpets and tear them free.

The second temptation was to board the helicopter on the Questar ’s after helipad – many such vessels carried helicopters for the purpose of having them drop patterned explosives on the seabed to register on the seismological computer – and go to have a close look at what would be the ensuing havoc, a temptation which he immediately regarded as pure self-indulgence.

He put both thoughts from his mind. Eight miles out from Galveston he unscrewed the button-covered switch and leaned firmly on the button beneath. The immediate results were wholly unspectacular, and Cronkite feared that they might have been out of radio range. But for those in the port area in Galveston the results were highly spectacular. Six shattering explosions occurred almost simultaneously, and within twenty seconds the Crusader , her stern section torn in half, developed a marked list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured through the ruptured side Another twenty seconds later – making forty seconds in all – the distant rumble of the explosions reached the ears of the listeners on the Questar. Cronkite and Mulhooney, alone on the bridge – the ship was on automatic pilot – looked at each other with grim satisfaction. Mulhooney, an Irishman with a true Irishman’s sense of occasion, produced an opened bottle of champagne and poured two brimming glassfuls. Cronkite, who normally detested the stuff, consumed his drink with considerable relish and set his glass down. It was then that the Crusader caught fire.

Its petrol tanks, true, were empty, but its engine diesel fuel tanks were almost completely topped up. In normal circumstances ignited diesel does not explode but burns with a ferocious intensity. Within seconds the smoke-veined flames had risen to a height of 200 feet, the height increasing with each passing moment until the whole city was bathed in a crimson glow, a phenomenon which the citizens of Galveston had never seen before and would almost certainly never see again. Even aboard the Questar , now some miles distant, the spectacle had an awe-inspiring and unearthly quality about it. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire stopped as the Crusader turned completely over on its side, the harbour waters quenching the flames into hissing extinction. Some patches of floating oil still flickered feebly across the harbour, but that was all that there was to it.