Seawitch Page 5

  ‘Over here,’ Roomer called softly. Mitchell joined him, and together they watched the white-clad figure of Lord Worth leave the Rolls and mount the steps of the helicopter. ‘I should think that that completes the payload for the night.’

  ‘The payload being?’

  ‘There are twenty-one other passengers aboard that machine. I can’t swear to it, but instinct tells me they are not honest, upright citizens. The story goes that every multi-millionaire–’

  ‘Bulti.’

  ‘Bulti. The story goes that every bulti-millionaire has his own private army. I think I’ve just seen one of Lord Worth’s platoons filing by.’

  ‘The second chopper plays no part in this?’

  ‘Far from it. It’s the star of the show. It’s loaded to the gunwales with weaponry.’

  ‘Not a crime in itself. Could be part of Lord Worth’s private collection. He’s got one of the biggest in the country.’

  ‘Private citizens aren’t allowed to have bazookas, machine-guns and high explosives in their collection.’

  ‘He borrowed them, you think?’

  ‘Yes. Without payment or receipt.’

  ‘The nearest government armoury?’

  ‘I should imagine.’

  ‘They’re still sitting there. Maybe they’re waiting a pre-set time before take-off. Might be some time. Let’s go to one of the cars and radio-phone the law.’

  ‘The nearest army command post is seven miles from here.’

  ‘Right.’

  The two men were on their feet and had taken only two steps towards the cars when, almost simultaneously, the engines of both helicopters started up with their usual clattering roar. Seconds later, both machines lifted off.

  Mitchell said: ‘Well, it was a thought.’

  ‘“Was” is right. And just look at them go. Honest God-fearing citizens with all their navigational lights on.’

  ‘That’s just in case someone bumps into them.’ Mitchell thought. ‘We could call up the nearest air force base and have them forced down.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Stolen government property.’

  ‘No evidence. Just our say-so. They’ll have to know Lord Worth is aboard. Who’s going to take the word of a couple of busted cops against his?’

  ‘No one. A sobering thought. Ever felt like a pariah?’

  ‘Like now. I just feel goddamned helpless. Well, let’s go and find some evidence. Where’s the nearest armoury from here?’

  ‘About a mile from the command post. I know where.’

  ‘Why can’t they keep their damned armouries inside their command posts?’

  ‘Armouries can and do blow up. How would you like to be sitting in a crowded barracks when an armoury blew up?’

  Roomer straightened from the key-hole of the main door of the armoury and reluctantly pocketed the very large set of keys for the carrying of which any ill-disposed law officer could have had him behind bars without any need for a warrant.

  ‘I thought I could open any door with this little lot. But not this door. You don’t have to guess where the keys are now.’

  ‘Probably sailing down from a chopper in the Gulf.’

  ‘Like as not. Those loading doors have the same lock. Apart from that, nothing but barred windows. You don’t have a hacksaw on you, Mike?’

  ‘I will next time.’ He shone his torch through one of the barred windows. All he could see was his own reflection. He took out his pistol, and holding it by the barrel, struck the heavy butt several times against the glass, without any noticeable effect–hardly surprising considering that the window lay several inches beyond the bars and the force of the blows was minimal.

  Roomer said: ‘And just what are you trying to do?’

  Mitchell was patient. ‘Break the glass.’

  ‘Breaking the glass won’t help you get inside.’

  ‘It’ll help me see and maybe hear. I wonder if that’s just plate glass or armoured stuff?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘True. Watch me finding out. If it’s armoured, the bullet will ricochet. Get down.’ Both men crouched and Mitchell fired one shot at an upward angle. The bullet did not ricochet. It passed through, leaving a jagged hole with radiating cracks. Mitchell began chipping away round the hole but desisted when Roomer appeared with a heavy car jack: a few powerful blows and Roomer had a hole almost a foot in diameter. Mitchell shone his torch through this: an office lined with filing cabinets and an open door beyond. He put his ear as close to the hole as possible and he heard it at once, the faint but unmistakable sound of metal clanging against metal and the shouting of unmistakably hoarse voices. Mitchell withdrew his head and nodded to Roomer, who stooped and listened in turn.

  Five seconds was enough. Roomer straightened and said: ‘There are a lot of frustrated people in there.’

  About a mile beyond the entrance to the army command post they stopped by a roadside telephone booth. Mitchell telephoned the army post, told them the state of defences at their armoury would bear investigation and that it would be advisable for them to bring along a duplicate set of keys for the main door. When asked who was speaking he hung up and returned to Roomer’s car.

  ‘Too late to call in the air force now, I suppose?’

  ‘Too late. They’ll be well out over extra-territorial waters by now. There’s no state of war. Not yet.’ He sighed. ‘Why, oh why, didn’t I have an infrared ciné camera tonight?’

  Over in Mississippi Conde’s task of breaking into the naval armoury there turned out to be ridiculously easy. He had with him only six men, although he had sixteen more waiting in reserve aboard the 120-foot vessel Roamer which was tied up dockside less than thirty feet from the armoury. Those men had already effectively neutralized the three armed guards who patrolled the dock area at night.

  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.

  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 gunme
n 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.