“Well gentlemen, there goes the only chance we had of taking off again,” Tom said calmly. “I’ve done my part. Let’s hope to hell that you’re able to do yours.”
“Come on, let’s get this stuff down below,” said the oldest engineer with an air of fatalism.
Chapter Three
Sam watched as the wall of water rapidly approached.
There was little that he could do about it. Second Chance would survive or she wouldn’t. His only option was to hold on.
He turned away, his back facing the oncoming barrage of water and closed his eyes. Taking one last deep breath, he grasped the inside grab bar with all the strength in both hands, and hoped that today wasn’t going to be his last.
The turbid wave of water hit him with the force of a Mack truck. The initial impact nearly rendered him unconscious. The strong flow swept his feet out from under him, and his hands locked onto the grab bar as he fought to avoid being flushed down the galley passage way.
The water was just starting to recede as a second wave struck the port side.
Sam had just enough time to take one more deep breath before the entire area was swamped with water again.
He thought his ship may broach and then roll, but Second Chance held true to her name.
Slowly, the water receded. Sam heard the familiar drone of the powerful automatic pumps deep in the bilge kick into life.
Picking himself up, he scanned the cabin.
It was going to take a lot of work to clean her, and some of the electronic equipment would need to be replaced, but all told, he had escaped lightly.
Another large wave struck, and he heard the mechanical workings of the autopilot struggling to maintain her course.
A deafening crack signaled the sound that is every sailor’s worst nightmare.
It was the sound of a cable snapping under pressure, followed by the sudden jolt of the yacht as its rudder stopped struggling to maintain her direction. The tiny storm jib, the only sail that remained, forming a triangle no longer than a couple feet, could now be heard flapping in the wind.
Sam didn’t wait to feel the pounding of the giant swell on his port side. Without the rudder, there was no way to control how Second Chance would face the oncoming swell.
In these seas, failure to run with the swell could only result in catastrophic damage to his yacht and his certain death by drowning.
He climbed up the stairs and stepped out through the tiny hatchway.
The storm surrounded him now. If he failed to gain control of the rudder within minutes he, and Second Chance, would be well on their way to the bottom of Bass Strait.
The autopilot was flashing and making an irritating noise as its computer tried to determine how to make adjustments. It was completely ineffective as long as the cable running from the steering block to the rudder was broken.
Sam hit the wait button on the autopilot in utter frustration. He didn’t need to hear that sound anymore. Then, without waiting to harness up and run a travel line, he quickly made his way to the transom. There, above the enormous rudder, were the remains of his old weather vane and next to them, the emergency tiller.
A simple, direct link to the rudder, the tiller was of little mechanical aid to steering, but it was something; the emergency tiller gave Sam at least the possibility of steering Second Chance by hand.
Sitting aft, Sam had little protection from the giant waves, running from behind him. If another wave flooded his deck again, harnessed or not, the force would send him overboard to his inevitable death.
As if to emphasize his exposure, a medium sized wave broke and splashed over him; its icy chill immediately jarring his mind into making a change in his course of action.
The one saving grace was the fact that up ahead, his tiny storm jib, little more than a couple of feet of canvas, provided just enough speed to maintain a strong enough flow of water over the rudder to keep a course. Sam angled Second Chance diagonally along the large, breaking swell, a motion more like surfing with the wave than fighting against it.
He was in for a long night if he were to survive at all.
His survival so far had been more about luck than skill, he acknowledged, but by the morning the storm had settled.
The next day, he limped to the outskirts of Hobart, where he was able to anchor in the lee of the mountain and make repairs. Running a second steering cable on Second Chance was easier than it sounded, because Sam had insisted on a redundant set of cables running side by side.
In the end, that repair took under an hour, but he then spent the next two days draining the bilge to protect the inner hull from salt water corrosion.
On the third day, Sam set the autopilot on a northerly heading, trimmed the sails, and commenced his long journey home to Sydney, where more serious repairs to his flooded yacht could be made.
Two hours later, well on his way north, and with the weather relatively calm, Sam took one last look at the horizon, checked his instruments, and climbed into the bunk he normally used when he was offshore.
Sam’s eyes closed, and comforted by the direction of the compass at the end of the bunk, he slept.
*
Tom watched as his beloved Sea King helicopter disappeared into the sea.
The wind was too strong and the landing space too poor to ever manage to keep her on the deck of the Hayward Bulk. Flying her back to the Maria Helena wasn’t even an option. She crashed into the sea a mere twenty seconds later, floating for a couple of minutes, and then swamped by a large wave.
Its sinking was enough to bring Tom back to the problem at hand.
The four scientists, who had been aboard the Sea King, along with a number of other crewmen from the Hayward Bulk, made their way down into the bowels of the ship, with the gigantic impeller.
Tom followed them to the entrance of the hull.
A stupid smile crossed his lips as he considered the ridiculousness of the situation, and his inability to now have any effect on its outcome.
The impeller, designed to bring in cold sea water to actively cool the engine, had split. Consequently, the engine wasn’t being cooled, and left unrepaired, would ultimately cause the engine to seize, turning a $20,000 repair job into a $1,000,000 need for a new engine. To avoid this, Global Shipping’s chief engineer had ordered a built-in safety system for each of his engines, to automatically shut down the engine should the impeller cease to draw in water.
The result of such a simple system was that everyone on board the Hayward Bulk, and potentially another three hundred thousand people, living in and around Cairns, might die, despite the engine being fully operational.
The irony of the system’s theoretical safeguard almost made Tom laugh as he watched the four engineers struggle to maneuver the massive impeller deep into the hull, where it could be fitted to the enormous super tanker’s engine.
Tom was just about to follow them, when he noticed that the man in the Armani suit, who appeared unsettlingly confident about the situation, was following the rest of the engineers to the door. But just before entering it, he looked around and then continued to walk toward the front of the ship.
What’s he up to?
Following him, Tom didn’t even attempt to hide. The wind was gusting so strongly, and there was so much sea spray in the air, Tom feared that he might likely be blown overboard before the man even realized he was being followed.
The closer the man came to approaching the bow, the more Tom worried about what he was up to. There were no working engines at the Hayward Bulk’s bow, so why was he headed there? Tom fully intended to find out.
The man was carrying a work bag, but for what purpose, Tom didn’t know.
Ahead, the man opened one of the hatchways into the hull, looked from right to left, and then disappeared below.
Tom ran ahead, trying to catch up.
He opened the hatchway and listened. The soft background lights that allowed the crew to see the inner workings of the ship’s bowels, allowed him to see only a
short distance ahead. Down below, he could hear the sound of someone moving fast, skipping a number of steps as they descended; not that Tom could hear very much over the sounds of the storm.
The man may have had a valid reason for being there. It seemed reasonable to assume that if he were an engineer with a purpose, he would be running down the stairs.
Tom followed the stairs to the bottom.
The bilge could be heard, the ship having already taken on large quantities of the water that had flooded the deck and was now swishing around the bottom.
Once he reached the bottom and looked around, Tom couldn’t see where the man had gone. It appeared to be a dead end, which served little purpose other than to provide buoyancy. Tom turned around to see if he could find another direction in which the man might have gone.
At the furthermost point of the bow, Tom’s flashlight revealed two comparatively small engines, which must have been used for the bow thruster.
At the portside engine, something caught his eye.
Tom saw the faint glow of a single red dot, which was flickering on and off. Ordinarily, Tom wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but in the absence of any other light, the single red light seemed out of place.
Climbing down to the engine, he placed his hand on the red light. It glowed on his hand as though its source was emanating from elsewhere.
His eyes followed the beam to its origin, and then stopped.
On the side of the hull, and about ten feet above him, were two single sticks of dynamite wired to a timer with a red LED light. As explosives go, it wasn’t much, but it was certainly enough to blow a big hole in the hull, one big enough to sink the Hayward Bulk – if cyclone Charlotte didn’t sink it first.
Tom’s mind grasped the outcome.
Above him, he heard the sound of a single steel bar sliding over the top of the hatchway.
He was trapped.
Chapter Four
The man in the Armani suit was feeling good.
Everything had fallen into place perfectly. At first, after his partner had destroyed the impeller, he’d been worried that they were going to be able to repair it before he could reach the stricken ship. Then, he heard about the cyclone, and the solution presented itself.
Malcolm Ford, a senior engineer for Global Shipping, was in Sydney at the time. It would be easy for him to offer assistance to the damaged ship. It would also provide him with more credibility, as the crew of the Maria Helena would most likely have never met the man.
The gamble had paid off, but he was worried that the pilot seemed to sense something wasn’t quite right. The man appeared too aware, much brighter than usual. After research, he discovered that the pilot was Sam Reilly’s right-hand man in Global Shipping’s special projects division – Deep Sea Expeditions.
As it was, that problem had been taken care of.
Now, he had less than an hour in which to retrieve it. He was going to have to work fast, but he was confident that he would have it in time.
The man ran back towards the main pilot house – the superstructure located at the rear of the ship, which housed the crew quarters, Navigation Bridge, and control tower.
To his relief, he didn’t run into anyone on his way there, and he quickly opened the door and stepped inside. The sound of the storm was instantly cut in half as he closed the door behind him.
He’d seen the schematics of the ship more than a week ago, and knew exactly where he was going –down more than a dozen sets of stairs, until he reached the bowels of the ship.
In the ordinarily locked room, he picked up the swipe card his friend had left for him and unlocked the door.
The room was small when compared to the vast size of the rest of the Hayward Bulk. It was dark, with no portholes to let in outside light. He turned the lights on, but they did nothing to make the place feel homelier.
At the far end of the room stood a single bed, and next to it was a laptop computer.
He turned the computer on and waited until the security login page booted up. Then, quickly typing in the alpha-numeric code, he watched as the startup screen changed to his homepage.
In the top left-hand corner, he clicked on a file labeled, “Time to go”.
Opening the file, his heart began to race as he realized he was close to achieving his goal. He clicked the “proceed” button, and the tool bar showed the time remaining before the process was complete.
Leaving the laptop open to continue running its program, and confident its owner would be too focused on current events to return to it, the man casually departed.
The smile never left his face until he was free.
He had done it.
He’d betrayed a man, and stolen something even more valuable than money.
*
Tom, unable to move the hatch above him, quickly returned to the place where he’d spotted the bomb. There was no identifiable timer, so he had no way to determine how much time he had left.
Tom realized it didn’t matter.
He was going to have to find a way of disposing of it. If he failed, the Hayward Bulk was going to be destroyed, and everything they’d done to save the lives of everyone within a thousand miles of the place was going to be for nothing.
To the right of the bomb, he found a spool of heavy chain. It weighed a lot and he was barely able to carry it to the steps above the bomb. Once there, he unrolled it as fast as he could and lowered one end. He wrapped the other end around a bollard until it locked upon itself.
He then carefully descended the large chain links until he reached the bomb.
It was only comprised of two sticks of dynamite with a simple internal timer. Someone from his unit probably could have disarmed it without thinking twice. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about bombs.
He grasped it in his right hand and pulled gently.
It separated from the wall easily enough, and since he was still alive, Tom thought that he was doing well so far.
Although he didn’t know much about the bomb itself, he’d seen enough explosives during his time in the Corps to know that people didn’t usually rig these with long timers.
He carried it to the top of the stairs and affixed it to the hatchway door.
If it detonates before I get out of here, it’s going to create my escape route…
Tom returned to the bottom of the stairs and started banging against the steel dividing wall, which made up part of the ship's watertight safety compartments. It was foolish to think such a sound might be heard above the sound of the cyclone, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
He found a fire extinguisher and used it to ram the side of the steel plate.
After banging away for ten minutes, Tom took a break, followed by another ten minutes of banging. At the end of his fifth attempt, the resonance of his banging was much louder than it had been at the start.
At first, he didn’t realize its origin; his ears still ringing and his head throbbing.
When he looked up, he realized that above him a ten-foot hole could be seen where the hatchway had been.
He’d found his exit.
If only there was enough time left to save the Hayward Bulk.
*
It took half a mile and fourteen flights of stairs for Tom to reach the bridge, which was located at the very back of the boat, and raised high up off the deck.
“Captain Ambrose?” Tom greeted the man, whose white beard and captain’s hat would easily identify him as the very image of any sea captain anywhere in the world.
“Yes,” he acknowledged, his eyes looking Tom up and down, “and you must be Mr. Bower, the pilot off the Maria Helena?”
“That’s me, and we have a serious problem.”
“We sure do, son. It appears that despite your valiant efforts, we’re going to hit that reef and tear the hull of my ship open as if it was a sardine can.”
“We’ll get to that in a second.” Tom paused, he had no idea how close they were to the reef. “One of the
engineers I transported onto this ship, a Mr. Malcolm Ford, is not who he says he is. I caught him planting a bomb at the front of the ship, and now I have no idea where he is.”
“Christ, my day just gets better and better.” The captain looked confused. “But why would anyone want to destroy my ship?”
“Most likely because of your payload and the catastrophic repercussions of its possible spill in these waters. It will be the worst terrorist attack in history!”
“Are you kidding me?” The captain laughed. “Our payload is going to go straight to the bottom. The only harm it will do is to any fish who are unfortunate enough to be swimming underneath us when we sink. Nothing else will come of it.”
“But, I was told you were carrying a load of uranium?”
“What, through the Torres Straits? Are you nuts? Jim Reilly would never allow it – not that he’d complain about the environmental risk, but if he were caught carrying uranium, the EPA would fine him so much that even he would never afford to sail a ship in these waters again.”
“Then what are you carrying?” Tom asked.
“Coal.”
“Just coal? Anything else? Why would James Reilly request all this support and risk all of our lives if you’re only carrying coal? What else would someone be after?”
The captain opened a special shipping manifest and noted an entry dated two weeks ago. “Jim Reilly was aboard just before we left Japan. He accessed his private vault.”
“He has a private vault?”
“Sure does. It’s rumored that he has a private suite on all of his supertankers, but this is the only one with a private vault.”
“Really?” Tom couldn’t imagine why James Reilly would need that. “What does he keep in it?”
“I have no idea, I’ve never known. I do know that it’s not drugs – I know that much for sure. We’ve had many drug-sniffing dogs come on board at some of the ports we dock at, and I’ve never seen a single one of them stop and alert at his vault.”
“How often does he access his vault?”
“Not very often, perhaps a couple of times a year.” The Captain’s eyes widened. “Whatever it is, we can safely assume that it’s quiet valuable.”
The Sam Reilly Collection Page 6