Алистер Маклин - Seawitch

Clearly, Lord Worth was going to require a new tanker, a requirement that presented quite a problem. In this area of a gross over-supply of tankers, any one of scores of laid-up super-tankers could be had just through exercising enough strength to lift a telephone. But 50,000 dw tankers, though not a dying breed, were a dwindling breed, principally because the main shipyards throughout the world had stopped producing them. ‘Had’ is the operative word. Keels of that size and even smaller were now being hastily laid down, but would not be in full operation for a year or two to come. The reason was perfectly simple. Super-tankers on the Arabian Gulf–Europe run had to make the long and prohibitively expensive circuit of the Cape of Good Hope because the newly reopened Suez Canal could not accommodate their immense draught, a problem that presented no difficulties to smaller tankers. It was said, and probably with more than a grain of truth, that the notoriously wily Greek ship-owners had established a corner of this particular market.

The dawn was in the sky.

At that precise moment there were scenes of considerable activity around and aboard the Seawitch. The Panamanian registered tanker, the Torbello , was just finishing the off-loading of the contents of the Seawitch ’s massive floating conical oil tank. As they were doing so, two helicopters appeared over the north-eastern horizon. Both were very large Sikorsky machines which had been bought by the thrifty Lord Worth for the traditional song, not because they were obsolete but because they were two of the scores that had become redundant since the end of the Vietnam war, and the armed forces had been only too anxious to get rid of them: civilian demand for ex-gunships is not high.

The first of those to land on the helipad debarked twenty-two men, led by Lord Worth and Giuseppe Palermo. The other twenty, who from their appearance were not much given to caring for widows and orphans, all carried with them the impeccable credentials of oil experts of one type or another. That they were experts was beyond question: what was equally beyond question was that none of them would have recognized a barrel of oil even if he had fallen into it. They were experts in diving, underwater demolition, the handling of high explosives and the accurate firing of a variety of unpleasant weapons.

The second helicopter arrived immediately after the first had taken off. Pilot and co-pilot apart, it carried no other human cargo. What it did carry was the immense and varied quantity of highly offensive weaponry from the Florida armoury, the loss of which had not yet been reported in the newspapers.

The oil rig crew watched the arrival of gunmen and weapons with an oddly dispassionate curiosity. They were men to whom the unusual was familiar; the odd, the incongruous, the inexplicable, part and parcel of their daily lives. Oil rig crews were a race apart and Lord Worth’s men formed a very special subdivision of that race.

Lord Worth called them all together, told of the threat to the Seawitch and the defensive measures he was undertaking, measures which were thoroughly approved of by the crew, who had as much regard for their own skins as the rest of mankind. Lord Worth finished by saying that he knew he had no need to swear them to secrecy.

In this the noble lord was perfectly correct. Though all experienced oilmen, there was hardly a man aboard who had not at one time or another had a close and painful acquaintanceship with the law. There were ex-convicts among them. There were escaped convicts among them. There were those whom the law was very anxious to interview. And there were parolees who had broken their parole. There could be no safer hideouts for those men than the Seawitch and Lord Worth’s privately-owned motel where they put up during their off-duty spells. No law-officer in his sane mind was going to question the towering respectability and integrity of one of the most powerful oil barons in the world, and by inevitable implication this attitude of mind extended to those in his employ.

In other words Lord Worth, through the invaluable intermediacy of Commander Larsen, picked his men with extreme care.

Accommodation for the newly-arrived men and storage for the weaponry presented no problem. Like many jack-ups, drill-ships and submersibles, the Seawitch had two complete sets of accommodation and messes, one for Westerners, the other for Orientals: there were at that time no Orientals aboard.

Lord Worth, Commander Larsen and Palermo held their own private council of war in the luxuriously equipped sitting-room which Lord Worth kept permanently reserved for himself. They agreed on everything. They agreed that Cronkite’s campaign against them would be distinguished by a noticeable lack of subtlety: outright violence was the only course open to him. Once the oil was offloaded ashore there was nothing Cronkite could do about it. He would not attempt to attack and sink a loaded tanker, just as he would not attempt to destroy their huge floating storage tank. Either method would cause such a massive oil slick, comparable to or probably exceeding the great oil slick caused by the Torrey Canyon disaster off the south-west coast of England some years previously. The ensuing international uproar would be bound to uncover something, and if Cronkite were implicated he would undoubtedly implicate the major oil companies – who wouldn’t like that at all. And that there would be a massive investigation was inevitable: ecology and pollution were still the watchwords of the day.

Cronkite could attack the flexible oil pipe that connected the rig with the tank, but the three men agreed that this could be taken care of. After Conde and the Roamer arrived and its cargo had been hoisted aboard, the Roamer would maintain a constant day-and-night patrol between the rig and the tank. The Seawitch was well equipped with sensory devices, apart from those which controlled the tensioning anchor cables. A radar scanner was in constant operation atop the derrick, and sonar devices were attached to each of the three giant legs some twenty feet under water. The radar could detect any hostile approach from air or sea, and the dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns, once aboard and installed, could take care of those. In the highly unlikely event of an underwater attack sonar would locate the source and a suitably placed depth-charge from the Roamer would attend to that.

Lord Worth, of course, was unaware that at that very moment another craft was moving out at high speed to join Cronkite on the Questar. It was a standard and well-established design irreverently known as the ‘pull-push’, where water was ducted in through a tube forward under the hull and forced out under pressure at the rear. It had no propeller and had been designed primarily for work close inshore or in swamps where there was always the danger of the propeller being fouled. The only difference between this vessel – the Starlight – and others was that it was equipped with a bank of lead acid batteries and could be electrically powered. Sonar could detect and accurately pinpoint a ship’s engines and propeller vibrations: it was virtually helpless against an electric pull-push.

Lord Worth and the others considered the possibility of a direct attack on the Seawitch. Because of her high degree of compartmentalization and her great positive buoyancy nothing short of an atom bomb was capable of disposing of something as large as a football field. Certainly no conventional weapon could. The attack, when it came, would be localized. The drilling derrick was an obvious target, but how Cronkite could approach it unseen could not be imagined. But of one thing Lord Worth was certain: when the attack came it would be levelled against the Seawitch.