Read Online Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith - Free Book Online Page A

welcome this as part of the entertainment provided by the tour.
    Yet, standing on his bridge, the Master was under no illusion as to the gravity of their situation. Peering through the streaming glass, he watched a work party, led by his First Officer, toiling heroically in the bows. Four men in glistening yellow plastic suits and hoods, drenched by the icy seas, working with the slow cold-numbed movements of automatons as they struggled to stream a sea-anchor and bring the ship’s head up into the sea, so that she might ride more easily, and perhaps slow her precipitous rush down onto the rocky coast. Twice in the preceding days, the anchors they had rigged had been torn away by sea and wind and the ship’s dead weight.
    Three hours before, he had called his engineering officers up from below, where the risk to their lives had become too great to chance against the remote possibility of restoring power to his main engines. He had conceded the battle to the sea and now he was planning the final moves when he must abandon his command and attempt to remove six hundred human beings from this helpless hulk to the even greater dangers and hardships of Cape Alarm’s barren and storm-rent shores.
    Cape Alarm was one of those few pinnacles of barren black rock which thrust out from beneath the thick white mantle of the Antarctic cap, pounded free of ice like an anvil beneath the eternal hammering assault of storm and sea and wind. The long straight ridge protruded almost fifty miles into the eastern extremity of the Weddell Sea, was fifty miles across at its widest point, and terminated in a pair of bull’s horns which formed a small protected bay named after the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
    Shackleton Bay, with its steep purple-black beaches of round polished pebbles, was the nesting ground of a huge colony of chin-strap penguin, and for this reason was one of Golden Adventurer’s regular ports of call. On each tour, the ship would anchor in the deep and calm waters of the bay, while her passengers went ashore to study and photograph the breeding birds and the extraordinary geological formations, sculptured by ice and wind into weird and grotesque shapes.
    Only ten days earlier, Golden Adventurer had weighed anchor in shackleton Bay and stood out into the Weddell Sea. The weather had been mild and still, with a slow oily swell and a bright clear sun. Now, before a force seven gale, in temperatures forty-five degrees colder, and borne on the wild dark sweep of the current, she was being carried back to that same black and rocky shore.
    There was no doubt in Captain Reilly’s mind - they were going to go aground on Cape Alarm, there was no avoiding that fate with this set of sea and wind, unless the French salvage tug reached them first.  La Mouette should have been in radar contact already, if the tug’s reported position was correct, and Basil Reilly let a little frown of worry crease the brown parchment skin of his forehead and shadows were in his eyes.
    “Another message from head office, sir.” His Second Officer was beside him now, a young man with the shape of a teddy bear swathed in thick woollen jerseys and marine blue top coat. Basil Reilly’s strict dress regulations had long ago been abandoned and their breaths steamed in the frigid air of the navigation bridge.
    “Very well.” Reilly glanced at the flimsy. “Send that to the tug master.”
    The contempt was clear in his voice, his disdain for this haggling between owners and salvors, when a great ship and six hundred lives were at risk in the cold sea. He knew what he would do if the salvage tug made contact before Golden Adventurer struck the waiting fangs of rock, he would override his owner s express orders and exercise his rights as Master by immediately accepting the offer of assistance under Lloyd’s Open Form.
    “But let him come,” he murmured to himself. “Please God, let him come,” and he raised his binoculars and slowly swept a