Seawitch - Страница 5

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Larsen was in the radio room at that moment, listening attentively, nodding from tune to time; then he flicked a switch that put the incoming call on the loudspeaker.

He said: «All clear, sir. Everything understood. We'll make the preparations. But haven't you overlooked something, sir?»

«Overlooked what?» Lord Worth's voice over the telephone carried the overtones of a man who couldn't possibly have overlooked anything.

«You've suggested that armed surface vessels may be used against us. If they're prepared to go to such lengths, isn't it feasible that they'll go to any lengths?»

«Get to the point, man.»

«The point is that it's easy enough to keep an eye on a couple of naval bases. But I suggest it's a bit more difficult to keep an eye on a dozen, maybe two dozen, airfields.»

«Good God!» There was a long pause during which the rattle of cogs and the meshing of gear wheels in Lord Worth's brain couldn't be heard. «Do you really think—»

«If I were the Seawitch, Lord Worth, it would be six and half-a-dozen to me whether I was clobbered by shells or bombs. And planes could get away from the scene of the crime a damn sight faster than ships. They could get clean away, whereas the U. S. Navy or land-based bombers would have a good chance of intercepting surface vessels. And another thing, Lord Worth—a ship could stop at a distance of a hundred miles. No distance at all for the guided missile: I believe they have a range of four thousand miles these days. When the missile was, say, twenty miles from us, they could switch on its heat-source tracking device. God knows, we're the only heat source for a hundred miles around.»

Another lengthy pause, then: «Any more encouraging thoughts occur to you, Commander Larsen?»

«Yes, sir. Just one. If I were the enemy—I may call them the enemy—»

«Call the devils what you want.»

«'If I were the enemy Fd use a submarine. They don't even have to break the surface to loose off a missile. Poof! No Seawitch. No signs of any attacker. Could well be put down to a massive explosion aboard the Seawitch. Far from impossible, sir.»

«You'll be telling me next that they'll be atomic-headed missiles.»

'To be picked up by a dozen seismological stations? I should think it hardly likely, sir. But that may just be wishful thinking. I, personally, have no wish to be vaporized.»

«I'll see you hi the morning.» The speaker went dead.

Larsen hung up his phone and smiled widely. One might have expected this action to reveal a set of yellowed fangs: instead, it revealed a perfect set of gleamingjy white teeth. He turned to look at Scoffield, his head driller and right-hand man.

Scoffield was a large, rubicund, smiling man, apparently the easygoing essence of good nature. To the fact that this was not precisely the case, any member of his drilling crews would have eagerly and blasphemously testified. Scoffield was a very tough citizen indeed, and one could assume that it was not innate modesty that made him conceal the fact: much more probably it was a permanent stricture of the facial muscles caused by the four long vertical scars on his cheeks, two on either side. Clearly he, like Larsen, was no great advocate of plastic surgery. He looked at Larsen with understandable «curiosity.

«What was all that about?»

«The day of reckoning is at hand. Prepare to meet thy doom. More specifically, his lordship is beset by enemies.» Larsen outlined Lord Worth's plight. «He's sending what sounds like a battalion of hard men out here in the early morning, accompanied by suitable weaponry. Then in the afternoon we are to expect a boat of some sort, loaded with even heavier weaponry.»

«I wonder where he's getting all those hard men and weaponry from.'*

«One wonders. One does not ask.»

«All this talk—your talk—about bombers and submarines and missiles. Do you believe that?»

«No. It's just that it's hard to pass up the opportunity to ruffle the aristocratic plumage.» He paused, then said thoughtfully: «At least I hope I don't believe it. Come on, let us examine our defenses.»

«You've got a pistol. I've got a pistol. That's defenses?»

«Well, where we'll mount the defenses when they arrive. Fixed large-bore guns, I should imagine.»

«If they arrive.»

«Give the devil his due. Lord Worth delivers.»

«From his own private armory, I suppose.»

«It wouldn't surprise me.»

«What do you really think, Commander?»

«I don't know. All I know is that if Lord

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Worth is even halfway right, life aboard may become slightly less monotonous in the next few days.»

The two men moved out into the gathering dusk on the platform. The Seawitch was moored in a hundred and fifty fathoms of water-—nine hundred feet, which was well within the tension-ing cables* capacities—safely south of the U.S. mineral leasing blocks and the great east-west fairway, right on top of the biggest oil reservoir yet discovered around the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The two men paused at the drilling derrick where a drill, at its maximum angled capacity, was trying to determine the extent of the oilfield. The crew looked at them without any particular affection but not with hostility. There was reason for the lack of warmth.

Before any laws were passed making such drilling illegal, Lord Worth wanted to scrape the bottom of this gigantic barrel of oil. Not that he was particularly worried, for government agencies are notoriously slow to act: but there was always the possibility that they might bestir themselves this time and that, horror of horrors, the bonanza might turn out to be vastly larger than estimated.

Hence the present attempt to discover the limits of the strike and hence the lack of warmth. Hence the reason why Larsen and Scoffield, both highly gifted slave drivers, born centuries out of their time, drove their men day and night. The men disliked it, but not to the point of rebellion. They were highly paid, well-housed and well-fed. True, there was little enough in the way of wine, women and song, but then, after an exhausting twelve-hour shift, those frivolities couldn't hope to compete with the attractions of a massive meal, then a long, deep sleep. More importantly and most unusually, the men were paid a bonus on every thousand barrels of oil.

Larsen and Scoffield made their way to the western apex of the platform and gazed out at the massive bulk of the storage tank, its topsides festooned with warning lights. They gazed at this for some tune, then turned and walked back toward the accommodation quarters.

Scoffield said: «Decided on your gun emplacements yet, Commander—if there are any guns?»

«There'll be guns.» Larsen was confident. «But we won't need any in this quarter.»

«Why?»

«Work it out for yourself. As for the rest, Fm not too sure. It'll come to me in my sleep. My turn for an early night. See you at four.»

The oil was not stored aboard the rig—it is forbidden by a law based strictly on common sense to store hydrocarbons at or near the working platform of an oil rig. Instead, Lord Worth, on Larsen's instructions—which had prudently come in the form of suggestions—had had built a huge floating tank which was anchored, on a basis precisely similar to that of the Seawitch herself, at a distance of about three hundred yards. Cleaned oil was pumped into this after it came up from the ocean floor, or, more precisely, from a massive limestone reef deep down below the ocean floor, a reef caused by tiny marine creatures of a now long-covered shallow sea of some half a billion years ago.

Once, sometimes twice, a day a 50,000-ton-capacity tanker would stop by and empty the huge tank. There were three of those tankers employed on the crisscross run to the southern United States. The North Hudson Oil Company did, in fact, have supertankers, but the use of them in this case did not serve Lord Worth's purpose. Even the entire contents of the Sea-witch's tank would not have filled a quarter of the supertanker's carrying capacity, and the possibility of a supertanker running at a loss, however small, would have been the source of waking nightmares for the North Hudson: equally importantly, the more isolated ports which Lord Worth favored for the delivery of his oil were unable to offer deep-water berthside facilities for anything in excess of fifty thousand tons.

It might be explained, in passing, that Lord Worth's choice of those obscure ports was not entirely fortuitous. Among the parties to the gentlemen's agreement against offshore drilling, some of the most vociferous of those who roundly condemned North Hudson's nefarious practices were, regrettably, North Hudson's best customers. They were the smaller companies who operated on marginal profits and lacked the resources to engage in research and exploration, which the larger companies did, investing allegedly vast sums in those projects and then, to the continuous fury of the Internal Revenue Service and the anger of numerous Congressional investigation committees, claiming even vaster tax exemptions. But to the smaller companies the lure of cheaper oil was irresistible. The Seawitch, which probably produced as much oil as all the government official leasing areas combined, seemed a sure and perpetual source of cheap oil—at least until the government stepped in, which might or might not happen in the next decade: the big companies had already demonstrated their capacity to deal with inept Congressional inquiries, and as long as the energy crisis continued nobody was going to worry very much about where oil came from, as long as it came. In addition, the smaller companies felt, if the OPEC—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries— could play ducks and drakes with oil prices whenever they fe}t like it, why couldn't they?