"Woods, Stuart - Run Before The Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Woods Stuart)

crossing. He walked to the ship's wheel, which was making small
movements under the command of the autopilot, sighted across the main
compass, and took a bearing on the sail, which was no more than a dot
of white on the horizon.

He noted the time and the bearing in the ship's log. Six minutes
later, with the dot now plainly recognizable as a boat, he took a
second bearing. It was unchanged. The 400,000-ton supertanker,
Byzantium, was on a collision course with an unknown yacht in the
middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.

It was bizarre, Martindale thought. They might be the only two vessels
within an area of some hundreds of square miles, and they were going to
strike each other unless one of them changed speed or course. He
thought of slowing the ship, but he knew that even with the engines
reversed the giant tanker might not slow enough from her thirty-knot
speed before running the smaller craft down.

He half turned to the seaman standing, daydreaming, a few feet away but
did not take his eyes from the yacht.

"Switch off autopilot. Hard right rudder."

The man, who had been lost in reverie, looked at him, surprised.

"Sir?"

"I said, switch off autopilot, hard right rudder."

"Sir, the captain ..."

"Do it, now." The seaman stepped to a console, turned a knob, then
took the wheel and spun it to the right.

"Autopilot switched off, hard right rudder, sir." He looked worried.

Martindale was worried, too. He reckoned they were two, two and a half
miles from the yacht. It might take the supertanker two miles to
answer the helm.

"When she answers come onto course two eight oh." He noted the time
carefully and logged the change in course.

"Course two eight oh, sir. When she answers." Now the seaman saw the
yacht, too.

"Jesus, Mr. Martindale, it's gonna be close."

A few feet down a corridor from the bridge, the captain stirred from
his sleep. Something had waked him; it took him a moment to realize