Free Year of the Golden Ape by Colin Forbes

brought to the house by truck, were placed at intervals across a vast lawn which ran away from the front of the house into the fields beyond. They were placed at intervals in two rows at right-angles to the house, each row one hundred and ten feet apart - the width of the Challenger. Earlier, Winter had paced out seven hundred and fifty feet from the steps of the house and he ended up with the tanker's bow in a field close to an old oak tree. Already several men were muttering about the size of the thing.
    From the steps of the house a double row of posts was erected right out to the distant oak tree, and this marked out the catwalk. Other poles represented the derricks and the foremast; a circle of rope on the port bow located the helicopter landing point. Then Winter took the team to the roof of the house which was fifty feet above the ground. They were now standing on the bridge of the Challenger, staring towards the distant oak which was the bow of the ship.
    'It's bigger than I thought,' LeCat admitted, staring at the distant oak.
    'It is a steep drop to the main deck,' Armand Bazin, a younger member of the team commented with surprise as he gazed down over the edge of the parapet.
    'Steeper than you think,' Winter warned. 'We are fifty feet up and it's a sixty-foot drop from the island bridge of the Challenger. All of you go down now on to the lawn, walk along the main deck, get some idea of what it will be like. And look up at this roof -which is the bridge. It will be like looking up a cliff...'
    They got ready to leave, but first Winter insisted on a huge cleaning-up operation. The oil drums were hidden inside a wood in the grounds. The sticks and poles which had represented catwalk and derricks and foremast were broken up and burned. Winter personally supervised a thorough scrubbing of the living-room floor to make sure that no traces were left of the chalk marks which had outlined the main deck. Furniture and carpets were put back as they had found them there.
    The debris of meals and drinking sessions - cans and bottles -were buried in a deep hole inside the wood, and French cigarette butts also went into the hole. No one had been allowed to smoke outside the house. These precautions LeCat appreciated - he remembered the care he himself had insisted on when the house on Dusquesne Street in Vancouver had been abandoned, when all the rooms had been Hoovered. And this, of course, was something Winter knew nothing about, just as he never dreamt there was a nuclear device hidden aboard the Pêcheur.
    Late on the afternoon of Tuesday January 14. Winter counted the sketches of the tanker prior to burning them. Tomorrow they would fly to Alaska.
     
    Because Harper was out of town, Sullivan had to wait until Tuesday before he could phone the chairman of Harper Tankships at his London office in Leadenhall Street. Which meant that while Winter was packing up at Cosgrove Manor, Sullivan was still in Hamburg.
    'In a way I've got nothing,' Sullivan told Victor Harper, 'only the fact that a hired thug tried to kill me in a bar when I went round asking about your company. But it happened in Hamburg -as though there's something here they don't want me to find out. What connection has your firm got with Hamburg?'
    'Nothing that I can see might have any bearing on this situation.' Harper's precise voice sounded irritated. 'Is this whole business becoming rather a wild goose chase? And who is this friend you refer to so mysteriously - the one who told you this yarn about French terrorists?'
    'Can't even hint -certainly not on the phone.'
    'I'm inclined to drop the whole thing ...'
    'You've never had any connection with Hamburg at all ?' Sullivan persisted.
    'Built a couple of ships there, that's all...'
    'Which ships?'
    'Couple of 50,000-tonners - the Challenger first, then its twin, the Chieftain. Both of them at the Wilhelm Voss yard. Paul Hahnemann is the boss - good chap, typically German; he drives the place like a steam engine.