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 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. Except for the pilot and copilot, it carried no other human cargo. What it did carry was the immense and varied quantity of highly offensive weapons from the Florida arsenal, the loss of which had not yet been reported in the newspapers.

The oil-rig crew watched the arrival of gunmen 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 are 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 had 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 they were all experienced, hardly a man aboard 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 then* 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 sub-mersibles, 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 off-loaded 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 a massive oil slick, comparable to or probably exceeding the great oil slick caused by the Torrey Canyon disaster off the southwest 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.

Cronkite could attack the flexible oil pipe that connected the rig with the tank, but the three men agreed that this could be taken care of. After Conde and the Roamer arrived and its cargo had been hoisted aboard, the Roamer would maintain a constant day-and-night patrol between the rig and the tank. The Seawitch was well-equipped with sensory devices, apart from those which controlled the tensioning anchor cables. A radar scanner was in constant operation atop the derrick, and sonar devices were attached to each of the three giant legs some twenty feet under water. The radar could detect any hostile approach from air or sea, and the dual-purpose antiaircraft guns, aboard and installed, could take care of those. In the highly unlikely event of an underwater attack, sonar would locate the source, and a suitably placed depth charge from the Roamer would attend to that.

Lord Worth, of course, was unaware that at that very moment another craft was moving out at high speed to join Cronkite on the Tiburon. It was a standard and well-established design irreverently known as the "push-pull," in which water was ducted in through a tube forward under the hull and forced out under pressure at the rear. It had no propeller and had been designed primarily for work close inshore or in swamps, where there was always the danger of the propeller being fouled. The only difference between this vessel – the Starlight – and others was that it was equipped with a bank of storage batteries and could be electrically powered. Sonar could detect and accurately pinpoint a ship's engines and propeller vibrations; it was virtually helpless against an electric push-pull.

Lord Worth and the others considered the possibility of a direct attack on the Seawitch. Because of her high degree of compartmentaliza-tion and her great positive buoyancy, nothing short of an atom bomb was capable of disposing of something as large as a football field. Certainly no conventional weapon could. The attack, when it came, would be localized. The drilling derrick was an obvious target, but how Cronkite could approach it unseen could not be imagined. But Lord Worth was certain of one thing: when the attack came it would be leveled against the Seawitch,

The next half hour was to prove, twice, just how wrong Lord Worth could be.

The first intimations of disaster came as Lord Worth was watching the fully laden Torbello just disappearing over the northern horizon; the Crusader, he knew, was due alongside the tank late that afternoon. Larsen, his face one huge scowl of fury, silently handed Lord Worth a signal just received in the radio office. Lord Worth read it, and his subsequent language would have disbarred him forever from a seat in the House of Lords. The message told, in cruelly unsparing fashion, of the spectacular end of the Crusader hi Galveston. -"'

Both men hurried to the radio room. Larsen contacted the Jupiter, their third tanker then off-loading at an obscure Louisiana port, told its captain the unhappy fate of the Crusader and warned him to have every man on board on constant lookout until they had cleared harbor. Lord Worth personally called the chief of police in Galveston, identified himself and demanded more details of the sinking of the Crusader. These he duly received, and none of them made him any happier. On inspiration, he asked if there had been a man called John Cronkite or a vessel belonging to a man of that name in the vicinity at the time. He was told to hang on while a check was made with Customs. Two minutes later he was told yes, there had been a John Cronkite aboard a vessel called the Tiburon, which had been moored directly aft of the Crusader. It was not known whether Cronkite was the owner or not. The Tiburon had sailed half an hour before the Crusader blew up.

Lord Worth peremptorily demanded that the Tiburon be apprehended and returned to port and that Cronkite be arrested. The police chief pointed out that international law prohibited the arrest of vessels on the high seas except in time of war and, as for Cronkite, there wasn't a shred of evidence to connect him with the sinking of the Crusader. Lord Worth then asked if he would trace the owner of the Tiburon. This the police chief promised to do, but warned that there might be a considerable delay. There were many registers to be consulted.