Keith grabbed Phil’s arm and pointed. “The four markers in front, and the one coming from Bermuda, are the tugs with the barges I told you about. They will converge along that light green line.” He pointed to the projected placement for the barges.
Then Keith frowned. Releasing Phil, he stepped to the screen and pointed at the single marker trailing behind the barges.
“Where is the other cutter?” he asked.
A young man stepped forward and handed him a memo. He read it quickly, his face growing ashen, and he suddenly glanced back up at the screen. “Damn.”
Phil stepped forward and Keith handed him the note. The text of it read simply, “Engine trouble in Cutter # 2. Crews working around the clock. If repairs are complete in eight hours, we can make target. If not, will be moving the boat out of the storm’s path.”
The top of the memo, a format Phil didn’t recognize, had a date and time. He checked his watch. It was stopped dead, and he glanced around. Keith caught the motion and showed him his own watch. The memo had been received four hours earlier.
“Have we got an update on their status?” Keith asked the young man who’d handed him the note.
“The last time we heard, they were on schedule, but barely,” was the reply. “There’s more.”
Keith took the second printout and read it carefully. This time he handed it to Phil more slowly.
Phil took it and read Andrea’s note.
“We’ve lost communication with the barges,” the young man continued. “This was the last thing that came over the computer. It was addressed to you, sir,” he nodded at Keith, “but considering the situation . . .”
Keith gestured for him to go on, though he was still reading. “We’re hoping the first cutter can get through to them via radio when it gets closer. It’s equipped with more powerful transmitters, and if they can relay, we might reestablish comms. It’s also possible that the station in Bermuda will get through, but everything from that area is spotty. The storm is causing some of the strangest interference we’ve ever seen.”
Phil glanced up at this, and then down at his stopped watch. “I believe that,” he said. “I’d say calling what’s out there ‘interference’ is a bit of an understatement.”
Everyone grew silent again, waiting to see if he’d say more, or if they’d offended him. Phil stared at them, and then waved his arms. “Well?” he said. “What other options do we have? Surely that broken down cutter isn’t the only answer?”
The tension snapped like a twig and everyone moved at once. Keith led Phil to Andrea’s seat, a comfortable leather office chair. “We have another boat on Bermuda,” he said. “It’s smaller, and not quite as fast. I don’t know if it’s ready to go, but I’ll find out.”
Phil nodded. He was staring at the smaller computer screen—he assumed that was what it was—on the desk in front of him, but he didn’t really see the display. He was tired, but Andrea’s message—those simple words, in all the madness he’d flown back into—had given him new strength. He knew he was completely out of the loop here. Everything they’d been doing, all the programs that had been underway when he’d taken off on that last mission, were as old as he felt, and about as useless. Still, there had to be something he could do, some way he could help. He knew he couldn’t just sit in this room and watch the others work; that would drive him crazy.
“Is there any way to get to Bermuda by air?” he asked.
“We could probably get to the island,” Keith said, shaking his head slowly, “but I don’t think they’d let us land. Not now. If the storm breaks, or continues on course toward the U.S. coastline, maybe then, but by then this is going to be a done deal. The best thing we can do is to keep contact with them and make sure that we take all precautions so that, if and when they get back, this place is still here to greet them.”
“Sir?” A long-haired woman with thick glasses turned from her console.
Keith paused and turned to her. “What is it, Susie?”
“We’ve raised the first cutter, sir. They are on course and on schedule—a little ahead of schedule, actually. They have no communications with the barges, but should be within range soon.”
“Keep on that,” Keith replied. “And see if you can raise Bermuda. We need to get the older boat underway, just in case.”
“What if you don’t have the two cutters when the barges are in place?” Phil asked.
“The plan would be aborted, if it was a normal storm,” Keith said, “and if Andrea was here, running the show, and not there.” He pointed vaguely at the center of the screen.
“And now?” Phil gripped the armrests of the chair tightly.
“I don’t know. The smart thing for them to do, if they don’t know they have a way out of there, would be to release the barges and get those tugs moving as quickly as possible. They could probably outrun the storm around that side and be out of harm’s way.”
“But you don’t think that’s what she’ll do,” Phil added.
“Do you?” Keith asked in return. “I don’t know. If it was her own life on the line, and no other, I have no doubt she’d do what she could to stop this storm or die in the attempt. With so many others along, I wouldn’t want to bet on it.
“You know she feels responsible for this. Hell, for all I know we are responsible for it. It was a big storm when you flew out to meet it, Phil, but it has grown way beyond that, and the probability is that the slick of oil I laid down in its path all those years ago was the cause. We’ve had a lot of chances to run the simulations since then. We’ve checked it every which way you can imagine, throwing in different weather conditions, wind speed, temperatures, varying the amount of oil, the location of the slick—even the seeding.” He glanced up at that.
“We never knew whether you dropped that load, or whether the timing was so screwed up that it didn’t matter. The others all claimed to have dropped their pellets at the same time, but they couldn’t be certain of it because time was—odd.”
“You can say that again,” Phil muttered.
Keith went on as if he hadn’t heard. “The only thing we are certain of is that the lead pilot of the cargo planes signaled for the release of the oil too soon. We know this now, not from asking them, or from any data gathered at the time, but from the simulations themselves. The storm hit the oil slick well ahead of the time your men began to drop the silver iodide, and the temperature difference to the south and west was all it took.”
“We’ve got Bermuda on line,” the woman named Susie called out from her radio console. “It’s Gabrielle.”
~ * ~
Gabrielle held the microphone close to her chest and hunched over it. The storm hadn’t reached Bermuda, but the outlying wind, rain, and swell was making itself known. It wasn’t as bad now that they’d reached the far side of the island, but it wasn’t what you’d call a good day for sailing.
“The tug and the barges are ready to get underway,” she said, almost screaming into the microphone. “The weather’s pretty bad, but once they are clear of the reef we can ride it out. We’ll be moving more quickly than the storm, and at an angle, trying to get well ahead of it and rendezvous with the others down south and west.”
“What about the cruiser?” Keith asked.
She wasn’t certain she’d heard him, but she answered anyway. “We aren’t taking the cruiser, Keith. We have barely enough staff here to man the barges. It’s been hard to get anyone off the island and we have to have every one of them to make this happen. If we tow the barges into place without enough trained personnel to operate the pumps, we’re wasting our time and risking lives for nothing.”
“We only have one cutter,” Keith told her. “If you go out there, we can’t guarantee everyone will get out alive. The last cutter may make it, but they are making emergency repairs. We can’t guarantee they will make it, and if they don’t, there won’t be time to get everyone out.”
Gabrielle pulled back and stared at the microphone in her hand in
disbelief. “So,” she said at last. “If we go out, but can’t take the cruiser, we’re just going to our deaths?”
There was no answer and she cursed, though not loudly enough to be heard over the radio.
“Can you find another crew?” Keith asked at last. “Isn’t there someone there who could man that cruiser and follow, someone you trust?”
Gabrielle was about to launch into one of longest and most colorful strings of curses of her adult life, but she never gave it breath. Just at that moment, a battered old truck rolled up to the pier. She didn’t know for sure who, or how many were on that truck, but she’d seen it before. Then, when the old man stepped out from behind the wheel, pulled a battered cap down over his eyes and hunched against the wind, she started to laugh.
“I might have something,” she said into the microphone. “No promises, but I just might have an answer here.”
“God knows we could use some good news,” Keith replied. “They’re out there, Gabrielle, and we can’t reach them on the radio. Andrea doesn’t even know there’s a problem.”
Her heart nearly stopped in her chest, but Gabrielle’s chin stiffened with resolve. “I’ll do what I can,” she replied. Then she put the microphone in its clip, exited the cabin of the tug, and worked her way carefully across the swaying bow to the shore.
She met the old man halfway across the dirt parking lot. It was the same fisherman she’d taken out to the fish farm. She glanced over his shoulder and saw that his old truck was filled with others, their faces planted against the rain washed glass, staring at her.
“I hear,” the man started in without hesitation, “that you go to fight the storm. I hear this, but I do not believe it. I also did not believe that you could bring fish from dead water, so now I wonder.”
Gabrielle didn’t answer, sensing that he wasn’t finished.
The old man turned and stared out into the choppy surf. “I have come to help. When you said you could bring the fish, we laughed at you. We told you we knew all there was to know about our home, and our fish, but you have brought things we have never seen, and we were wrong.
“Today they told me you would fight the storm, and I laughed. I told them that you could not fight a storm from a ship, and that you would all die. Do you know what they told me?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
Gabrielle shook her head.
“They tell me that if you can bring fish to dead water, maybe you can stop the storm—and that it would be something to see.” He turned back to face her and smiled. “I’ve lived a long time, and I think I would like to see you fight this storm.”
Gabrielle smiled. She turned and pointed at the boat she affectionately called “The Cruiser.” It was much newer and more powerful than the boats the fishermen took out every day, but there was nowhere else to turn.
“Do you think you can pilot that boat?” she asked him.
The old man stared at the cruiser for no longer than a second, then he nodded. “Of course,” he said. “It is a boat, and I am a captain.” He shrugged as if her question and its answer were academic.
“Then you can help, and I welcome you,” she told him. “We are going to stop that storm, if we can, and I think that we can.” She pointed at the barges, anchored out a few hundred yards, and the ocean-going tug being prepared for sea at the end of the pier. “We have to get those barges into place, and once we do, we will need our people brought to safety. The boat that was going to do this for us may not make it—but if you and your men . . .”
He held up a hand. “We can do this,” he said.
Gabrielle nodded. “I’ll send one of my people with you,” she said. “They are familiar with the controls and can go over them with you while you get underway.”
“Good hunting,” he said to her, his smile widening. “Perhaps we will meet in front of the storm and see whether growing fish is the limit of your magic.”
“It’s not mag . . .” she stopped herself. That conversation would have to wait until there was a lot more time. For now, if the man thought she had magic to offer, that was fine. All she needed from him was the possibility that she’d see another day when this one was done. Beyond that, there was plenty of time to teach the science of fish farming, and maybe for her to go out on their boats and learn how to man the nets. Who knew?
She hurried off to the tug to reassign a person to the cruiser, and the fisherman called his men from the truck. They were already boarding the cruiser when Gabrielle reached the tug’s deck.
~ * ~
On the cutter Daybreak—four hours behind her sister ship Moontide—the order was given to turn over the engines. Repairs were complete, but all hands waited, breath held and eyes closed in silent prayer, for the roar of the diesel engines. A sputter wouldn’t do. They were heading into the most dangerous cruise of their lives, and anything less than fully operational was not going to be enough.
The engines coughed only once, then caught with a thrumming roar. Moments later, the decks rang with the cheers of the crew, and the captain, George Clayton, stood on the bridge, staring out over the darkened waves. He wasn’t sure, even at that moment, whether he was glad to hear the engines, or terrified, but he let none of this show. He couldn’t afford to pass any doubt or weakness on to his crew—not now.
“Get us moving,” he growled, and the merriment on the bridge slowed and became a deep silence. The cutter accelerated smoothly, and Clayton fingered the small St. Christopher’s medal dangling by a chain from his throat. He was no more superstitious than the next man, but these were extraordinary circumstances, and he was taking no chances.
“Give me as much speed as you can,” he told his helmsman, “but be careful. We aren’t so far behind we can’t catch up, but it won’t help anyone if we beat ourselves to hell on the waves.”
The young seaman nodded. If nothing changed, and the engines held, they would come even with the first cutter late the next day. None of them wanted to think about what would happen if there were more problems, but they all understood the situation. The barges were well ahead of the first cutter, and there had been no communication since just after Moontide pulled away from the pier. If they didn’t make it to the rendezvous point at the scheduled time, then people were likely to be stranded in the path of the most powerful hurricane in history. None of them wanted that on their conscience.
The moon shone down clear and bright. Only light cloud cover blurred their view of the stars. The waves were light, and it was difficult to believe the storm waited not so many hours distant.
“Get Scharf on the radio,” Clayton said, turning from the window and heading for his cabin. “Tell him we’re on our way.”
As Captain Clayton stepped off the bridge, the cutter plowed through the glittering, moonlight glazed waves, rushing against the clock.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Andrea tried several times to sleep, but she could not. It wasn’t the waves, though the wind had picked up considerably. She knew she should be resting. She wasn’t as young as she’d been, and despite her health and the fact that she felt—in her mind—no older than she’d been the day she’d watched Phil take off thirty years in the past, her body knew better. She was going to have to draw on reserves she might not even have before this was done, but sleep eluded her, and she tossed and turned on the hard bunk, fighting her restless mind for release.
Everything had taken on the unreal, slow motion aspect of a dream. She’d felt similar sensations in the green-gold calm before a thunderstorm, or on occasions when she’d known some important confrontation or meeting would take place. The energy was building up inside her, ready to release on a hair-trigger, but it was impossible to keep it from leaking through to her conscious mind and into the moment.
They had not heard from the cutters, or from Keith, since she’d sent her last e-mail. They weren’t in position yet, but they must be close enough to the storm to pick up some sort of odd interference. There was no way to know what exactly was preventing
them from getting through, but they were able to communicate with the other boat, and with the barges, so there was nothing wrong with the equipment.
She lay awake, thinking about the placement of the barges. She forced herself not to think about the cutters following behind. She hated being out of touch. In her world, back at the compound, she could reach literally worldwide for anything she needed. The Internet had become second nature to her, and the thought that the one person in all her life she most wished she could just talk to was sitting back in that complex, waiting for her and that she couldn’t reach him would have driven her quickly mad if it had not been for the storm.
She couldn’t run a full simulation from the laptop without access to her network, so she couldn’t even tell what was likely to happen when they got their pumps into place. She’d spent most of the day calculating the placement, taking into consideration, as much as possible, the smaller capacity she was working with. It was infuriating, after so many months of research with the pumps, to be thrown into this so quickly that she had no time to use the full set of tools at her disposal. With the computers back at the compound she could have gone into this with more confidence—though if the simulations had not been as good as she hoped, she knew she’d have gone through with it anyway—but maybe it was better not to know. They were, after all, only simulations, and putting too much faith in simulations and calculations was what had brought them to this point in the first place. There was no way to plan for the “joker” in the deck—the random factors of nature, the universe, and fate.
The tug’s engines chugged rhythmically, and though she couldn’t sleep, the sound was soothing, almost hypnotic. She drifted, her mind not really anchored to any one thought or image. She remembered Phil as she’d last seen him. She thought of the hangar, and wondered if he’d seen it and known why she had left the way she had. She thought of Keith, and the computers, and wondered if he had done what she hadn’t had the time to do. She wondered if he’d run the simulations and if he knew—better than she did—what they faced.
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