Free Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith Page B

wings of sprayed diesel oil, pumped directly from the ship’s bunkers; its viscous weight resisted the wind’s efforts to tear it away, and it fell in a thick coating across the surface of the sea, broken by the floodlights into the colour spectrum of the rainbow.
    Immediately, the sea was soothed, the wind-riven surface flattened by the weight of oil, so the swells passed in smooth and weighty majesty beneath the ship’s hull.
    The two officers on the wing of the bridge could feel the sick, waterlogged response of the hull. She was heavy with the water in her, no longer light and quick and alive.
    “Send the boats away,” said the Captain, and the mate passed the order over the radio in quiet conversational tones.
    The hydraulic arms of the derricks lifted the six boats off their chocks and swung them out over the ship’s side, suspended one moment high above the surface; then, as the ship fell through the trough, the oil-streaked crest raced by only 6 feet below their keels. The officer of each lifeboat must judge the sea, and operate the winch so as to drop neatly onto the back slope of a passing swell — then instantly detach the automatic clamps and stand away from the threatening steel cliff of the ship’s side.
    In the floodlights, the little boats shone wetly with spray, brilliant electric yellow in colour, and decorated with garlands of ice like christmas toys. In the small armoured-glass windows the officers faces also glistened whitely with the strain and concentration of these terrifying moments, as each tried to judge the rushing black seas.
    Suddenly the heavy nylon rope that held the cone shaped drogue of the sea-anchor snapped with a report like a cannon shot, and the rope snaked and hissed in the air, a vicious whiplash which could have sliced a man in half. It was like slipping the head halter from a wild stallion.
    Golden Adventurer threw up her bows, joyous to be freed of restraint. She slewed back across the scend of the sea, and was immediately pinned helplessly broadside, her starboard side into the wind, and the three yellow lifeboats still dangling.
    A huge wave reared up out of the darkness. As it rushed down on the ship, one of the lifeboats sheared her cables and fell heavily to the surface, the tiny propeller churning frantically, trying to bring her round to meet the wave but the wave caught her and dashed her back against the steel side of the ship.
    She burst like a ripe melon and the guts spilled out of her; from the bridge they saw the crew swirled helplessly away into the darkness. The little locator lamps on their lifejackets burned feebly as fire-flies in the darkness and then blinked out in the storm.
    The forward lifeboard was swung like a door-knocker against the ship, her forward cable jammed so she dangled stern upmost, and as each wave punched into her, she was smashed against the hull. They could hear the men in her screaming, a thin pitiful sound on the wind, that went on for many minutes as the sea slowly beat the boat into a tangle of wreckage.
    The third boat was also swung viciously against the hull. The releases on her clamps opened, and she dropped twenty feet into the boil-and-surge of water, submerging completely and then bobbing free like a yellow fishing float after the strike. Leaking and settling swiftly, she limped away into the clamorous night.
    “Oh, my God!” whispered Captain Reilly, and in the harsh lights of the bridge, his face was suddenly old and haggard. In a single stroke he had lost half his boats. As yet he did not mourn the men taken by the sea, that would come later - now it was the loss of the boats that appalled him, for it threatened the lives of nearly six hundred others.
    “The other boats —” the First Officer’s voice was ragged with shock “—the others got away safely, sir.” In the lee of the towering hull, protected from both wind and sea the other three boats had dropped smoothly to the surface and detached swiftly. Now