by Rich Johnson
On hands and knees, with the flashlight in his teeth, he pulled at the rope and crawled forward. He felt the ship list heavily to starboard and knew a deep trough was passing beneath the hull. A heartbeat later, a solid flood of seawater cascaded through the black tunnel, catching him by surprise, filling his mouth with the sharp taste of salt, and washing him backward on the slippery metal.
An ugly groan, deep and low, like the warning growl of a predatory beast about to attack, echoed from the trembling pile. Something shifted, but at first, Josh couldn’t tell if it was just the movement of the ship, or if the pile was edging sideways. He tugged at the rope, but it wouldn’t budge. “Slack!” he yelled, but the roar of the next wave sweeping over the bow drowned out his words. He tugged again, but the rope was tight as a steel bar. With daylight just a few feet ahead, he didn’t want to have to back forty feet through the tight tunnel to retrace his steps. His fingers whipped at the knot around his waist, tugging at the loop and the running end, and in a matter of seconds he had it undone. The ship rolled again, and the containers groaned, louder and closer this time.
Throwing himself forward, Josh scrambled for the daylight and caught his fingers around a door latch bar that was a perfect handhold. With all his strength, he pulled himself out of the tunnel and was instantly inundated as the next swell sent seawater exploding over the bow. With a sickening growl, the unstable pile of containers shifted under the weight of the flood, knocking him off his feet, and the tunnel he had just escaped from slammed shut like a giant trash compactor.
The containers were shifting, and steel walls pressed toward him. An open slot offered itself, and he dodged into its protective airspace. A sliding cargo box narrowly missed him as it gained speed and thundered into the box behind him. Together, the two containers shifted toward the edge of the ship, then stopped as the ship rolled to port on the crest of a swell as it passed beneath the hull.
Seconds later, Josh felt his feet going out from under him again as the ship dropped into the next trough, and the container behind him disappeared into the sea. Two more of the huge metal boxes rushed toward him, but then the ship rose on the next swell, and their momentum stopped.
I’ve got to get out of here!
There was nothing behind him now but air and the open sea, and the wind clutched at his clothes, tearing at him, dragging him toward the edge. Over his shoulder, he saw nothing but an endless series of foam-topped waves lining up to punish the ship. On the next roll of the ship, a container knocked free from the pile shoved its way toward him, and he had no place to go but to grab the latching handle and hang on. The hull rose on the next swell and the box stopped, but not until the end of it was cantilevered over the open sea, with Josh dangling by his fingers.
Below him, swells reached up to snatch at his legs. Into the next trough and over the following swell he held on, but his hands were weakening. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was swept away, plummeting along with the falling container. To his left, he spotted a container that was jammed tight in the stack, like a stuck puzzle piece. It was now or never. He jammed his toes onto a tiny ledge and heaved himself upward, throwing his left hand out to catch a knobby door hinge.
One inch at a time, he edged up and sideways until he could grip the corner of the cargo box with his left hand, then he waited for just the right moment. At the peak of the next crest, as the ship momentarily paused before falling off into the next trough, he let go his right hand, braced both against the corner and then threw himself out into space, hoping to come down on something solid.
From somewhere that sounded like the bowels of hell, the horrible noise of metal grinding against metal split the air. The containers shifted again, this time violently, and the one Josh had been clinging to moments before, slid over the edge and fell into the sea.
Regaining his feet, he clambered to the next container aft and to port, as far away from the starboard edge as he could move. Ahead of him, the rope dangled, and above it Romero stood watching.
“On belay!” Josh shouted as he grabbed the rope. “Haul me up!”
Romero grabbed rope, backed away, and the line shot upward. Josh gripped the rope with both hands, leaned back slightly, planted his feet and started climbing. When he reached the edge, he flattened his palms on the surface and pushed himself up and over. For a moment he lay on the platform breathing heavily, then he rolled over and looked at Romero.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” the crewman asked.
Josh grinned. “I found a whole new meaning to the concept of living on the edge. Other than that, no, I didn’t. Thanks for being here for me. Got kind of rough down there.”
Half an hour later, as the chopper lifted off, Josh placed a secure satellite call to Delamo. “It’s not onboard the Desdemonda. I went into the jaws of the monster looking for it, but it’s gone. What’s the news about Susan?”
“She’s out of surgery and in stable condition. There is hope that her eye will recover.” Delamo didn’t say anything more for a few seconds, giving Josh a moment to digest the good news.
Josh pressed back against the chopper’s seat, relieved to hear the positive prognosis “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. The rest of my life is in kind of a mess. Desdemonda lost a lot of containers over the past thirty hours or so; I’m thinking nine at least, but we’re not sure exactly how many yet. It’s going to take some crane work to straighten it all out so they can take inventory. These things could be spread out over a couple hundred thousand square miles of the southwest Caribbean. It’s going to take a major search effort.”
“It’s likely that some of them will sink, and we’ll never find them.”
“I know, but statistically some will stay afloat. And, personally, I’m not willing to bet the future of the United States on whether or not bravo, alpha, one, one, mike is going to be a sinker or a floater.”
“I agree. I’ll get some CIA assets in the air to augment the search already underway by the Coast Guard. You sound a little exhausted. I suggest you take a couple days off in exotic Colon. I’ll keep you posted about the search as it gets underway.”
“And about Susan?”
“Of course.”
Josh flipped the satphone antenna down, crossed his arms and laid his head back against the webbing of the seatback. His eyes drifted shut, and a moment later he was asleep, rocked comfortably by the movement of the helicopter, and droned into unconsciousness by the rhythm of engine and rotors. It wasn’t until they landed on the cutter, and he had to get off the chopper to follow safe refueling procedure, that he realized just how exhausted he was as he dragged himself up to the nav station.
The physical requirements of his work, he could handle. But the emotional stress of hearing about Susan’s injuries had knocked him down. He loved her, and he was sure she loved him. There was something in the way she looked at him, and he wanted to see that again. As he stood gazing out over the fueling platform and drinking a cup of coffee, he thought how ridiculous it was for them to play this silly game. When I see her again, I’m going to tell her what I’ve been meaning to say all these years.
He finished the drink and reached to toss the foam cup in the trash bin when he heard the first low whump. “Get down,” someone yelled, and he instinctively hit the floor just as a yellow ball of flame filled the windows and he heard the distinctive sound of a ship’s siren.
Chapter Twenty-six
When he came to, Husam al Din couldn’t tell exactly where he was, except that it was dark and he was pinned under something heavy and soft. Gradually his head cleared, and he backtracked through his mind, trying to figure things out. He wasn’t sure how long he had been unconscious, but the lights inside his brain were only slowly coming back on. The last memory he came up with was of being inside a trailer, sealed in a cargo container on a ship named Desdemonda, on his way to Miami to deploy a biological weapon of mass destruction.
He reached for his left wrist, found the wat
ch and pushed the button to illuminate the face. It read Nov 1 and the hands showed that the time was 8:41, but he didn’t know if that was morning or night. Not that it mattered very much. It had been weeks since he lost contact with the five-time each day ritual of his prayers. Not knowing which direction it was to Mecca, he had fallen into almost total neglect of the very thing that held his life together since childhood. The thought made him sad and angry at the same time: sad about what Allah must certainly be thinking about him now, and angry at the situation that brought him to this regrettable point.
The weight pressed down against him, and he pushed back, bracing himself against whatever the hard object was behind him, and shoving with arms and legs. The soft heaviness that weighed him down moved easily. With his fingers, he probed the surface until he found an edge, and then he recognized it as the mattress. I am against the ceiling and the bed is on top of me.
In his mind, he rehearsed the layout of the trailer. The bed was all the way at one end, with the bathroom, then kitchen between him and the living room at the other end. Beneath the weight of the mattress, he turned and crawled toward the open space. His feet were surrounded by rubble, and he kicked it aside and stood in the utter blackness, reaching out to steady himself as his world pitched and rolled. The motion was different somehow – faster and more pronounced. Through the walls of the trailer, he thought he heard the sound of water sloshing about.
His hand found the rocker switch on the wall, and he flicked on the lights. The scene was chaos, and it took a moment for his mind to adjust to his inverted world. Down the hall, he saw the cabinet and sink, suspended from what appeared to be the ceiling. He opened the door next to him, and stared at the upturned toilet, and paper unrolled and swimming in six inches of sewage that apparently found its way back through the plumbing from the holding tank.
He pushed the door shut, thankful that the wall above the top of the jamb would constrain the filth of that room. Down the hallway ahead of him, the rest of the trailer looked like a junkyard. But even though the trailer was upside down, and everything in it had been thrown out of place, he decided that he could make do. The food and water would still be okay, he reasoned, and the small table and the comfortable living room chair could be turned over and used on the ceiling, which was now the floor. If his watch was correct, and it was now the first of November, he would soon be in Miami. But what has happened to the ship? Why is the trailer upside down? The thoughts troubled him, but without any answers and without any control over the situation, he could do nothing except wait to see what happened next.
He gritted his teeth. “Nice trick!” he yelled into the darkness. It was his first informal communication with his god, and he hoped that even though he was not facing Mecca and perhaps the time was not according to tradition, Allah would hear him. “But I will not be broken. I am Husam al Din, Sword of the Faith. It is my destiny,” – he slammed his fist against the thin lauan wall, driving a hole through the paneling – “and I will carry it out. Test me if you must, but I will not fail!”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Captain Klaus Pfister looked up from his desk, as the door opened and Josh was escorted in. “Sorry we lost a day, but I’m just glad that’s all we lost.”
Josh took a seat. “Yeah, I got the report.”
Pfister nodded. “No serious casualties. I guess that’s why the refueling team wear their fireproof space suits. The chopper can be repaired, and the cutter is undergoing a refit. And there’s the obligatory investigation into the cause of the fire. I think they’ll come up with a grounding problem and an errant static spark, but we’ll see.”
“The ride back on the cutter wasn’t all that bad,” – Josh flipped open a notebook – “but it gave me a whole new appreciation about being a land mammal. Here, my boss requested this.” He handed a small stack of papers across the desk.
Pfister quickly leafed through them. “Yeah, I ordered the same stuff from NOAA. Trying to figure out the set and drift of normal currents is pretty straight forward, but things get all out of whack when a storm the size of a hurricane comes into play. It’s going to be a crapshoot. The play of wind against whatever portion of the container is still above the waterline has to be factored against the influence of currents below the waterline. Not having reliable data about either of those factors will make the task exceptionally difficult. Some of the data buoys were destroyed, either blown off station or sunk outright. We’re doing all we can to determine where any surviving containers might have drifted, but we’ll need a large dose of luck.”
“Well, this is all we have to go on right now. I’ve been following the reports about Yolanda. Sounds like she hooked north and scrubbed the west end of Cuba pretty hard.
“The good news is that when she headed across land she lost strength and came out the other side a marginal category 2 and dwindling. Looks like she’s going to continue to downgrade before finally going ashore south of Tampa.
“The Gulf Coast dodges another bullet. After Katrina, everybody along that coast holds their breath when a southern Caribbean storm heads up through the channel.”
“Yeah,” Pfister said, “It’ll take years to recover from that one.”
“Well, to help prevent any further disasters, I’d like to get in the air as quickly as possible.”
A serious look crossed Pfister’s face. “Last time I took you anywhere, one of our choppers nearly blew up. You think I’m going to trust you again?”
It took a moment, but Josh finally detected a crack in the captain’s straight face. Looking as serious as he could, he retorted, “Last time I let you take me anywhere, you dang near killed me. You think I’m going to trust your airline again?”
“All right, I guess that makes us even. Go grab a helmet. I’ve already got a pair of C-130s flying patterns based on the best LKPs we could extrapolate for the string of containers lost in the 30-some-odd hours Desdemonda was fighting the storm. We might as well fly a third pattern in a Dolphin.”
November 2nd
“Hey dad?” The voice came from over his shoulder, as Dan sat on the wide captain’s seat scanning the horizon with a binocular.
“Yeah, Cadee, what is it?”
“I’m just looking at the chart plotter and I noticed that we’re heading toward San Luis Miguel.”
Without taking his eyes off the horizon, Dan absently fielded the question. “Yeah, so what?”
“Well, I hope we’re not going to land there.”
“Why not? I thought it might be a good place to refill our water tanks.”
“Maria Elena told me that there are pirates in these islands, and that we should stay as far away as possible.”
Dan put the binocular down. “Now how could that little girl know such a thing?”
“She said they steal everything, even children, then sell them. She told me that they will kill anybody who tries to stop them. They have machetes and guns, and she said they have no soul.”
“Pirates without a soul? Sounds grim,” he said, then grabbed her for a hug. “I won’t let anything bad happen to us. I’m the master and commander, remember?”
“Yeah, but dad …”
He picked up the binocular again and stared out across the water. “No yeah buts, I promise we’ll be careful. Besides, Maria Elena might just have a very active imagination.”
“I don’t think so, dad. She’s very mature for her age.”
“No doubt. I’m sure life in the San Blas Islands will make a girl grow up and take responsibility a lot faster than girls her age in the cities.”
“Maybe she even knows things about these islands. You’re always telling us how important it is to get local knowledge about the places we’re sailing.”
Dan laid aside the binocular and swung around to face Cadee. “Local knowledge is very important, honey. That’s why I spent so much time with Sven. He knows this part of the Caribbean better than anybody I’ve met. He kept us out of that hurricane we’ve been hearing about o
n the radio. But he didn’t say anything to me about pirates.”
“Well, maybe he doesn’t know everything.”
Dan laughed. “No, I’m sure he doesn’t know everything.” He saw from the look in her eyes that Cadee was worried. “Okay, I’ll tell you what, if it will make you feel better we’ll skirt this island group and conserve on our water supply until we get farther north. How does that sound?”
Cadee’s eyes brightened, and she threw her arms around his neck. “Thanks, dad. Maria Elena would be very happy about this. She was really concerned, and even made me promise to mention it to you.”
“Well, we don’t want to disappoint Maria Elena, now do we?” He winked. “If you’ll stand watch for me for a few minutes, I’ll go down to the nav station and work out a new set of waypoints that will take us around San Luis Miguel.”
She hopped up into the captain’s chair. “Can I take it off autopilot and bear to starboard a few degrees, so we don’t get any closer?”
“If it will make you feel better.”
With the manual override system, the autopilot released control as soon as she took the wheel and gave it a turn. The wheel turned easily in her hand, and the catamaran responded immediately. On the new course, the wind played over the sails a little differently, so she reset the autopilot to hold the new course, stepped to the traveler to ease the main sheet, and then to the winch to ease the genoa. A smile of pride filled her face as she craned her neck to look up at the sails, now full and taut and the telltales flying straight back.
As Dan ducked into the cabin, a thought struck him, and he called out to Cadee. “I was watching something about thirty-five degrees to starboard and maybe a couple miles off. Keep your eye out so we don’t run into anything, okay?”
“Sure, dad,” she said as she climbed back into the seat. “I turned us only about ten degrees, but I’ll watch for it.” She picked up the binocular and scanned the horizon in an arc to the right of their course, looking for whatever it was her dad had been watching.