by Andy Lettau
Many of the experienced sailors turned away in disgust, but there was no doubt: The USS George W. Bush was heading towards a capsized passenger ship with its keel, three propellers and two rudders pointing upwards.
The closer the submarine came to the capsized cruise ship, with the huge stylized yellow sun on the rear, the more shocking it became for the crew. They were not exactly over-sensitive choirboys but well trained officers and NCOs who had been drilled by the US Navy, if necessary, to exterminate the lives of millions with thermonuclear weapons - and even for them the sight of this landscape of death was a devastating experience. Most of the men on board had taken the threat made by the enemy, however bizarre it might have seemed, as something abstract so far. It had been regarded more as a cat-and-mouse game involving software and high-tech than a real conflict. The crew had simply not been prepared for the sight of real corpses.
The lifeless torso of a young woman was washed on the foredeck by the bow wave, where it got caught backwards. The men stared as if petrified at her pale bloated face, from which whole sections and large chunks of flesh had been ripped. Where previously the eyes of the woman had been there were now two black holes. A part of the chin was bare. Nobody said it, but everybody knew it: The sharks had eaten well.
O’ Brian retched when he saw something living in the ragged mouth of the corpse. A small dark water snake was wriggling energetically before sliding out, diving into the water and disappearing.
When O`Brian saw this, he vomited on deck. Overcome by nausea, he turned away from the young woman, who aroused in him baleful thoughts about what might have happened to Mariam.
Nobody said a word. For several minutes there was only uncomprehending horror, which was cut short by a slightly bigger wave that pulled the lifeless torso into the water and washed it alongside.
O’ Brian went back under deck. His eyes were burning from the bad air. At the same time tears of helplessness began to gather there.
Once down there he needed a moment to get himself together again - just like most of his shipmates, who were looking at the images transmitted by a fixed video camera outside on a monitor. Thanks to the darkness only outlines and suggestions of the horrific scenes could be seen. Those who had not been above could count themselves lucky.
"You need strong nerves," the Captain was heard saying. He made no secret of what the Search and Rescue team could expect to find. The carpet of dead bodies the size of a football pitch was possibly only a bitter preview of the inside of the badly hit luxury liner.
"OK, men, I need volunteers."
After his performance on deck O’ Brian was not about to offer himself. His shirt still reeked of vomit and he was ashamed to speak to the others. Without waiting for the end of the recruiting session, he went back to his cabin to change his shirt and trousers. He washed off his shoes in the wash basin, and luckily his socks hadn't been touched. At that moment he didn't stop to think of saving the life-giving water from the desalination plant or keeping energy consumption down to the minimum. It was only when his shipmates pointed to the stream of water with a meaningful look that he finished his cleaning.
He had a break in his shift, so he went to lie down. He fell into a restless sleep that lasted almost four hours. During his sleep, full of nightmares, he kept turning from side to side, as if he were suffering from a fever. Sweat was pouring from him and his clean blue shirt was a shade darker when he finally woke up.
He shook himself awake, stumbled to the wash basin and filled his beaker with cold water to get rid of the stale taste in his mouth. He then put on his damp shoes and made his way to the mess. The first SAR team had just got back and were telling the rest of the crew about the gruesome things they had found on the cruise liner.
The men had already washed and changed. The mood was depressed and the horror was almost palpable. John Harris, the team leader, was the first to speak, as he poked his fork listlessly around his plate.
"Dead bodies, nothing but half-decomposed dead bodies. And the smell - the fetid air on this bucket is a holiday in a spring meadow by comparison. Not even the engine room when Tom and his boys haven't washed for a week smells as bad."
"Did you find anything there? What ship was it anyway?" a thin pale man with blond hair and a three-day beard asked.
"Pride of America. 222,000 gross register tons. A few hundred crew and 5,000 passengers. A real dream ship. At least until the fucking meteorite hit it. Now it's just a nightmare."
Harris made a decision: he had to reduce the pressure. Otherwise he would be vomiting from suppressed disgust, like O`Brian.
"You can't walk three steps without climbing over broken furniture and most of all dead bodies. Men, women, children. Everything mown down by the grim reaper, everything that got in his way. The lowest part was under water, and that's where the corpses looked worst. We had to get through this indescribable mixture of rotting flesh and oil. We had no choice. Just be grateful that you didn't have to be there."
Harris left out no details, however small and repellent, in the rest of his description. On the contrary. It seemed to offer him a safety valve, through which his bad mood, end-of-the-world feeling and hopelessness could blow themselves out. The more gruesome the details were, the more it seemed to him that the misery on board the USS George W. Bush was in fact the symbol of flourishing life.
A young recruit then became impatient.
"Get on with it. Did you find anything?"
"I've got good news and bad news for you ..."
"Out with it," O’ Brian said.
Harris carried on unruffled: "The bad news first. There were no survivors. Zilch!"
"And now the good news?" O’ Brian started to drum with his fingers on the tabletop.
"The good news: We were able to break through to a halfway intact store room, where we found deep-frozen and unspoiled food. Emergency power units were still running. We also found cigars and a wide range of alcoholic liquors."
Those sitting at the table listening began to whisper when they heard this. The prospect of alcohol for some was mouthwatering. But whether Captain Hudson would allow them to drink on board was another matter.
Another member of the special team came into the room in full gear. The stench of death clung to the oil-stained black things. The gas mask was hanging by a strap from his neck. He was built like a tank. "OK, John, what did you manage to get?"
"You mean the Christmas tree?"
"Yep!"
"Yeah, we thought it might look a bit more festive here, even if Christmas Eve has gone. We brought a huge fir tree back. Ten feet high, made of plastic. At least there are no needles on it."
"Delightful", said O’ Brian, who shook his head disbelievingly. "Now at least we can go out in style. If we'd known, we'd have brought our families along, for one final bender under a plastic tree."
A dozen pair of eyes suddenly turned to stare at him. There was silence for a moment, then Paul Slazenger, a small compact fellow in his mid-thirties, slapped him on the shoulder and tried to lighten the mood.
"Still a little party would help us to cope with what's happened, the officers won't have anything against it. I mean, our mission must be over, orders from above. The President has been called to face the Last Tribunal. So, what the hell? The Captain probably wants a decent Scotch more than the rest of us."
"We even found German beer from Bavaria," Harris added. He was determined to drive away the lousy atmosphere on board by talking about anything wasn't serious. The men were only too glad to join in.
"How about that? One thing the Germans can really do well is brew a good beer. You've got to hand it to them. I was in Munich for the Oktoberfest, they throw that stuff down them as if they wanted to take a bath in it," somebody remembered.
"Do you know what they call a big beer?"
"A big one?" Harris replied.
"No, naturally the Germans are very precise about quantities."
Harris tried again: "A half-gallon of beer?"<
br />
"You moron, they've got the metric system."
"Oh, you mean they order a litre of beer on the Oktoberfest?"
"Harris, you idiot, not even the Germans are as wooden as that. The Bavarians are like you goddamned Texans - they order a 'mass'."
"I'll have a mass, s'il vous plait", someone joked.
"Fuck you! I'll give you s‘il vous plait, bonehead. That's what the French say,", someone else joined in.
"What? The Froggies drink litres of beer, too?"
"No idea, I've never been there. But they sure as hell don't say 'mass'!"
"But?"
"May be, le mass, or even better 'le massage'."
"Shit, that's the first witty remark I've ever heard you make: Une grande massage, Madame, silvouplay", added the ship's cook, Robert Meyers.
For O`Brian this nonsense had gone too far. He decided to go back to his quarters.
"Keep my massage for later, I'm going back to my cabin. I've had enough. We've been through a sea full of dead bodies today and you're acting like cool killers in a stupid movie."
"So? The whole situation is like some movie," said a young guy at the end of the table bitterly. "Quentin Tarantino would have made a blockbuster out of our story."
"Tara who?", asked the cook in the middle and then started to think out loud.
"Tara who, Tara something ... … I mean Tarantino. He made Death Proof ..."
"Death Proof. Sounds about right. Yeah, your Mr Tarantino can make a movie about our old steel beauty. Title: Crazy Voyage in a Submarine," Harris joined in. O`Brian's pensiveness was beginning to irritate him.
O'Brian had had enough and raised his hand to say he was leaving. "You'll all be here tomorrow, I guess ..."
"Sure will. We're so attached to the old tub. But you won't find us as sober as we are now. We are here on board the USS George W. Bush. We've got to live up to the name! We can't just let the stuff go to waste."
O’Brian forced a weak smile at Harris' intended witticism. "I see. So how would we spend the time if the ship had named after President Clinton?”
"Stupid question, O’ Brian. We've got enough fuel on board, but only a handful of women. And they will be divided among the best."
There was hooping and the body language was more than explicit. Harris put his fingers to his lips, psst! and made a clear sign as a challenge for O`Brian to reply.
"Well, who says you really need women for this?"
"Faggot! No wonder you puke when you see a corpse," was Harris' aggressive reply.
All of a sudden it fell silent. Calling someone a fag was a serious business. But O`Brian wasn't fazed. He took some time to formulate his reply, but before he was able to say anything, Jason Miller was clever enough to cut him short.
"Leave it, Ted. And that goes for you too, Harris! Before you start cracking each other's skulls over some crap, let's look for something drinkable."
The men relaxed, some of them looked sheepishly at the ceiling. O`Brian narrowly escaped from the danger zone that was threatening to develop with Miller, with whom there had always been an excellent understanding. When he was out of sight of the group, he said thoughtfully:
"I'm afraid that the real shit has only just started. So far the men have turned their frustration and sadness in on themselves. But if the Captain gives the order to start drinking, there's going to be an emotional helter-skelter, that will get out of control and probably lead to overreactions."
"Maybe you're right, maybe not. But a couple of stiff drinks have never done any harm," Miller tried to reassure him.
"Maybe ...."
"And you'll get drunk, if we really have had it, won't you ?"
O`Brian said nothing. He made an excuse and left so that he could be alone for the next few hours.
“What a nightmare, what a goddamned nightmare. If this goes on, some of them'll be at each other's throats ..."
CHAPTER 5
Over the Atlantic Ocean
American President's Plane Air Force One
27th December
Air Force One, which had started from the Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, at the moment the meteorite had struck, was in its third day trying to escape from the forces of nature that had been unleashed and even in the most remote corners of the planet had left a trail of devastation. The odyssey of the most expensive aircraft in the world looked as if it might meet its end in the near future, because its supply of kerosene had been used up and the remaining escort, a KCR-135 Stratotanker, had released its last drops of fuel in a selfless act of heroism six hours ago, after which it crashed into the sea near the Brazilian coast. Air Force Two, the same model, had also disappeared. It had been gone for a day, when the last radio contact with NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, had been cut off by interference that killed everything. Before that the two planes had flown into all emergency landing airports in a tightly organized emergency plan, mostly in risky and highly dramatic take-off and landing situations, in which the last survivors demanding entry into the flying Noah's Ark were kept from boarding at gunpoint by the Secret Service on board.
While the water level kept rising unstoppably and even the Sahara had been turned into a mud zone that buried everything, it generally became clear to everyone on board the jumbo jet bristling with electronics that had become useless that there was not a single place for them to land. In the hope of being able to survive a ditching and maybe be rescued by an aircraft carrier or frigate, Air Force One had flown for several hours grid by grid over the middle of the Atlantic looking for a needle in a haystack. All instruments for the engines were already red, beyond the max. load limit
"Three and four are out, losing power," was the analysis of the co-pilot, a small round man, calm and factual. He kept his eyes on the instruments, while the pilot, a former fighter and test pilot of the US Navy, kept a routine eye simultaneously on the displays and the ocean below.
"Mark, in ten minutes at the latest we're going to be the biggest sailplane in the world. You should start thinking. The spot back there seems OK." The co-pilot was pointing to a red shining spot on the horizon that looked as arbitrary as the rest of the wet grave beneath their enormous wings almost scrubbed bare by heated particles.
"Jack", the good-looking sunburned man shifted to the left side of the cockpit, "your jokes used to be a bit better."
The door behind the men opened and an attractive woman in her early fifties came in. Without paying any attention to her, they started to go through the checklist. They didn't want any announcement made. Not yet.
The commander of the government airport, Colonel Margaret H. Woodcraft, had already been through quite a bit. But what had happened in the last few days and nights or was happening now was way beyond all the ideas she had had of her own end. At the last moment she had gotten a survival ticket in Washington, had gone on board in the last couple of hours become great friends with the First Lady and her poodle. Now she was hurrying into the cockpit at the order of the President to find out how things stood. Because all the instrument panels were flashing red and the Captain was clearly beginning to nosedive. The nightmare seemed to become a reality.
"Are we going down?"
It was more of a statement than a question.
"Yes. Please sit and fasten your seat belts. It could get nasty", said the pilot.
"Oh …"
The officer understood and closed the door to the cockpit. On her way to the President, who was sitting in the back suite with his wife and closest advisors, she saw a dozen pairs of eyes. Colonel Woodcraft let it be known, with gestures and a frequently whispered, 'It's time', that the ditching was imminent. When she reached the President and his wife, she did not need to repeat the pilot's words, because there was an announcement from the cockpit at that moment over the loud speaker system.
"Mr. and Mrs. President, ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of the flight. Our tanks are empty, the turbines are full of ashes. We have to land. Please pay attention to
the instructions of the cabin crew. May God help us. Cabin Crew: Prepare for landing!"
The male and female flight attendants provided by the Secret Service went through the two decks to make sure of the seating positions of the passengers. About one hundred and fifty of the leading people in the country sat in the plane, clutching their back rests. Some of the women began to whimper, the men to murmur prayers. A former Admiral, whose military short hair looked like a wheat field after harvest, stoically emptied a glass of bourbon, fondling his companion, a former Defense Secretary. "Take it easy, honey. I know the boys in the cockpit. They may be crazy, but they're reliable. Anyway this bird has had enough of all these precious people on board. If we get drunk, let's at least do it in style."
No sooner had he spoken than one of the cabin crew took his drink from him. "Admiral Adamski, would you please fast..."
The admiral wanted to say something, but just then there was a tremendous jolt in the whole plane. Some people started to cry out, but this was not yet the impact. Engines number three and four had just stopped working. The effect of the abrupt cut-out of thrust had made the 747 explode as if it had hit an invisible wall.
Further back, in the President's suite, Jerome Johnson looked deep into his wife's eyes, after the advisors had left the room. They were sitting in especially soft seats of the finest nubuk-leather, which had been impregnated in an expensive process – like the whole interior of the plane – and, in accordance with the highest technical standards, as fireproof as possible. Flammability point was extremely high – an interior design feature that at that moment was the furthest thing from the President's mind.
"I love you", the attractive First Lady whispered into her husband's ear. In her voice there was an unmistakable trembling, a sign of fear. Her facial features looked strained from the worries of the last few days. Her almond eyes showed signs of tiredness and hopelessness. "I'll always love you, Jerome, even if we ..."