It was midmorning, yet only the dimmest tinge of gray daylight cut the murky darkness, supplementing the flickering gleam of the few surviving deck-side work arcs. And vision full into the blast of the hurricane was flatly impossible.
Twisting her left wrist into the lifeline to hold herself in place, Amanda covered her eyes with her right hand, leaving a slit parted between her fingers. The old typhoon fighter’s trick worked as well here in the Atlantic as it did in the China Sea. With her sight partially shielded, she could look into the face of the storm, seeking Chief Tehoa.
The Chief and a Seabee work party were on deck doing direct battle with the hurricane. A fight Amanda feared they had no chance of winning.
As the tempest had mounted and the storm-driven waves had grown higher, the platform crew had been forced to uncouple the hard links joining the nine superbarges that made up Floater 1. Opening the hard links allowed the barges to ride with the seas more easily, and a failure to do so would have resulted in the couplings being torn bodily out of the barge hulls as the wave action exceeded their play limits.
However, even as links kept the barges together, they also served to keep them separate. Interconnected now by only a network of mooring hawsers, the massive barges slammed and jostled into each other with each oncoming wave. Work details were forced to sortie out onto the decks in an agonizing effort to keep the platform components wedged apart.
Ben Tehoa led one such team now, working at the juncture point between four of the barges. Tethered off on their lifelines and with their water-sodden clothing whipping at their bodies, the seamen stood back and warily regarded the monster.
The cover plates that bridged the gaps between the platform sections were long gone, blown aside by the wave action. The yard-wide spaces between the barge hulls now gaped open and smashed closed, four sets of gnashing steel jaws waiting to pulp anything or anyone that might slip between them. Intermittently, as a storm comber crawled under the hulls, a sheeting geyser of seawater would explode upward through the gaps, the tearing wind shredding the curtain of ejected water away into a cloud of stinging salt mist.
Bearing a massive manila ship’s fender, Tehoa and his men hunkered down against the force of the wind, awaiting the moment when the jaws would open again.
As Amanda looked on, it came, the barges lifting with the swell and the gaps opening in response. Faintly she heard Tehoa’s wordless shout and the detail lunged forward, seeking to thrust the gag into the monster’s mouth.
For an instant, Amanda thought they might succeed. Then the sea slumped away beneath the platform and a roaring jet of storm-compressed water and air fountained skyward, hurling the fender away and knocking the work party sprawling.
One seaman, fouled in his own lifeline and caught in the reversing rush of the seawater, was swept to the edge of the gap. As the sailor was on the verge of toppling between the barges, Tehoa lunged for the man. Catching his arm, the Chief hauled him away from death. Outraged at the loss of their prey, the steel jaws snapped shut with a reverberating crash.
Battered and beaten, the work party drew back into the windbreak of a deck module to regroup and reassess. Amanda joined them behind the shelter.
“How is it going, Chief?” she yelled into Tehoa’s ear.
“Not good!” the big man bellowed back over the storm clamor. “Not good! It’s hell keeping the fenders in place, and they don’t help all that much when we can!”
“What about air bags?”
“Totally useless! The barges chew ’em up like bubble gum. Problem is, we’re quartering into the weather! She ain’t riding clean!”
Proving his point, another storm roller broke across Floater 1. Impacting on the port-side forward angle of the platform, its force twisted and jammed the barge complex together in ways it was not designed for.
The beam of a battle lantern flashed across the Chief and Amanda as another seaman collapsed into the shelter of the deck module. “Chief,” the sailor raked spray-sodden hair out of a pair of frightened eyes, “we got trouble! We got water coming in!”
“Where?” Amanda demanded.
“This corner of Outboard Four. The next barge to port, ma’am.”
“Let’s go!”
The passage to the crisis point entailed a carefully gauged leap between the two superbarges, aided only by a wildly whipping lifeline, then a plunge down through a deck hatch. Within the massive platform segment, they were sheltered from the bite of rain and spray and the maniacal howl of the hurricane was at least muffled. Now, however, could be heard the squeal and creak of steel under stress, and the rolling crash of one barge against another reverberated like a thunderbolt.
Each barge had been compartmentalized into hundreds of smaller interconnected cells. The upper-level spaces were used for dry supply and equipment storage. Deeper in the massive hulls, below the waterline, could be found tankage for drinking water and fuel. Amanda, the Chief, and their guide descended to these decks via a series of narrow, condensation-slick ladders.
The barge’s interior lighting circuits had failed on the lowest level, and they dropped into a darkness lit only by the glow of a few emergency battle lanterns. Dropping from the ladder, Amanda found herself standing calf-deep in seawater.
Ahead, down the passageway, a lantern beam blazed in her face. “Captain Garrett? Glad you’re here, ma’am. We got trouble.”
“So I see.” Amanda sloshed toward the light, bracing herself against the moisture-slick bulkheads. “Who do we have down here, and how much of a problem do we have?”
“Petty Officer First Trevington, ma’am, Damage Control Four Delta.” The battle lantern made a circle around a group of tense DC hands. “We got impact damage in the frames just forward of here.”
“Let’s have a look. Do we have pumps working on this water?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the team leader replied, leading Amanda and Tehoa forward along the starboard quarter of the barge. “The barge pumps are on line and the drain valves are open. We’re holding for now, but if it gets worse …”
They folded themselves through another small watertight door, entering the next passageway section. Here a solid sheet of water cascaded down the face of the outboard bulkhead. Amanda pushed a hand into the flow, gauging its intensity. “We’ve got a cracked weld,” she said after a few seconds’ study. “Do we have any vertical separation or plate fractures yet?”
“No, ma’am. So far we just got that one seam unzipping along the top of this bulkhead frame, but it’s widening and getting longer. We’re going to get involvement in the next compartment pretty quick.”
As if to emphasis the DC hand’s point, the barge shoulder butted its neighbor, the impact striking through the heavy steel plates like a cannon discharge. Amanda found herself thrown back against the far bulkhead, her arm numbed to the shoulder by the shock.
Chief Tehoa caught her before she could go to the deck. “You okay, Captain?”
“Pretty much,” she replied, trying to shake the numbness from her paralyzed limb. If she’d been leaning with her weight against that arm, bones would have shattered. “We’ve got to get this shored up before a plate caves in.”
“Bracing and shoring team is already on the way, Captain,” the DC man reported.
“Shoring’s only going to be a temporary fix, ma’am,” Tehoa added grimly, setting her back onto her feet. “The platform’s going to open up like this at every impact point within the structure if we don’t do something about the way she’s riding. We can’t take these quartering seas for much longer.”
“I know it, Chief.”
“Gangway! Make a hole!” The shout reverberated down the darkened passageway as the bracing and shoring team arrived on site. Bearing their array of sledgehammers, four by-four timbers, and plywood panels, they sprang to the task of reinforcing the forward angle of the
barge hull.
“Chief,” Amanda said, sidling out of the way. “You stay here and see what you can do to get this secured. I’m going up to the tower to confer with Commander Gueletti.”
“Okay, Captain. We’ll do what we can. I just hope you and the Commander can come up with something.”
“Me too, Chief. Me too.”
If anything, the winds had grown in intensity while Amanda had been below. The transit back to the core barge could be made only thanks to the lifelines and the intermittent patches of protection afforded behind the deck modules. Entering the base of the platform control tower, she paused only long enough to press a few handfuls of water out of her sodden hair and khakis, then climbed for the command center. The erratic lurching and rolling of the core barge, noticeable enough on the weather deck, grew with each level climbed, forcing Amanda to maintain a death grip on the ladderway railings.
Emerging on the command deck, she suddenly froze at the head of the ladderway. Lord God! Down on the weather deck you were too close to it. But up here you could see!
As Amanda looked beyond the tower windows, a hypervelocity gust momentarily tore the curtain of rain away.
The sky glowed an evil and diseased verdigris, lightning crawling about in its boiling belly. And the waves, a vast curving front of gray storm-driven combers, marched in from the horizon, their arched backs hoary with wind-riven spray. As each wave reached the windward corner of the platform, it curled over to butt like an enraged bull elephant, perishing in an explosion of water that buried Floater 1’s decks. Waves of compression and release could be seen radiating through the platform structure with each blow.
The next supersquall hit and a roaring wall of precipitation cut off the view. It was a very rare thing for Amanda Garrett to be afraid of the sea, but she knew fear now. Floater 1 couldn’t take this kind of punishment for long. No mere man-made structure could.
In the far corner of the command deck, Commander Steve Gueletti leaned over the shoulder of one of his systems operators, fighting a desperate delaying action.
“How much room do we have in the stern bunkerage tanks of number one?” he demanded, his voice raised over the sound of the storm.
“Twelve thousand gallons, sir.”
“Initiate high-speed fuel transfer from bow to stern bunkers. Twelve thousand gallons.”
“Initiating transfer,” the S.0. replied, her voice emotionless. Her fingers danced across her keyboard, feeding commands into the ballasting system. “Barge 1 systems acknowledging, fuel transfer initiated.”
“Onboard sewage system. Purge all storage tanks to sea.”
“Sewage system purge initiated. All storage tanks blowing to sea.”
Concerned or not, Amanda looked on with interest. This was seamanship of a kind she was unfamiliar with.
“Barge 1 again,” Gueletti continued, staring down at the tankage control displays. “Storage cells K4 and K8. Pump to sea.”
The S.O. looked up. “Verify, sir. Those are drinking water storage. We have over four thousand gallons in each cell.”
“I know it. And I know there won’t be anyone left around to drink it if number one gets driven under. We’ve got to keep her leading edge up. Pump to sea!”
Using the handrail around the central chart table, Amanda made her way around to the ballast control station. “You’ve got more of a water problem than you know, Steve. I’ve just come up from number four. You’ve got some seams opening up down there.”
“Tell me about it, Captain,” the Seabee replied. “We’re taking water in one and two as well, and I’m expecting flooding reports from the other barges at any time. She’s starting to hammer herself to pieces. This quartering sea is killing us. We take much more of it and she’s going to come apart like a soggy cardboard box.”
Amanda tightened her grip on the rail as the tower swayed under the impact of another macroburst. “What can we do about it?”
“That’s just it, Captain. There’s not a solitary goddamn thing we can do.”
“Commander,” another systems operator called from his station. “The computer’s finished the ride simulation. This doesn’t look good, sir.”
“You’d better have a look at this, Captain,” Gueletti said, arming his way around to the simulation console. “I’ve had my people run a structural analysis and projection on the cumulative storm damage. This will give us an idea where we’re going to stand in another couple of hours.”
Amanda joined him at the shoulder of the sweating S.O. “Run the ride analysis,” Gueletti commanded.
The systems operator hit a key sequence. A phantom outline of Floater 1 appeared on the computer monitor; nine rectangular barges in three ranks of three, afloat on a gridwork sea.
“Initiate standard projected storm action.”
The gridwork ocean humped up and rolled. Arrows rezzed into existence, stabbing at the bow of the platform, indicating the impact points of wind and wave. Smoothly the interlinked raft of barges sequentially rode up and over the incoming waves.
“If we were facing into the wind and sea like this, we wouldn’t be having any trouble,” Gueletti elaborated. “However, when we anchored Floater 1 here, we oriented her to face to the southwest, into the normal predominant weather patterns. This storm’s a freak, though. It’s coming in straight from the south, and we’re taking it on our port quarter rather than head-on.”
The Seabee commander issued another order to the systems operator: “Alter storm bearing.”
The computer-generated tempest on the monitor pivoted to match the real-world storm. Now the interconnected barges no longer rode smoothly; they twisted and jostled within the formation, as they were doing now. Red flashes pulsed on the screen, denoting collision points.
“Initiate cumulative damage program.”
Small blue squares began to appear within the barges, radiating outward from the collision points. “This is cumulative sequential flooding from the storm damage. As you can see, as we take on water, the barges begin to lose stability within the platform structure. As stability is lost, the rate of damage accumulation accelerates. We can counter to a degree by shifting ballast within the barges, like I was doing when you came up, but not enough to stop the process.”
The number of blue squares grew explosively and the riding of the barges grew wilder. “Eventually,” Gueletti continued, “the cumulative damage becomes so severe that the structural integrity of the platform will be compromised.”
On the monitor screen, the graphics model of Floater 1 broke up into its component segments, some of the barges capsizing and sinking, others being driven away before the storm.
“How long do we have until breakup?” Amanda asked, her voice only just audible above the wind.
“By this projection, about four hours, ma’am,” the systems operator said almost apologetically.
“And how much longer until this storm blows over us?”
“Six.” Gueletti let the single word hang in the air.
Amanda turned away from the simulations console. Gripping the handrail of the chart table, she stared out into the storm murk for almost a full minute, assessing potentials.
“We’ve got to turn her into the wind,” she said abruptly. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Agreed, but how?” Gueletti said, coming to share a hand grip beside her. “Even in a dead calm, nothing short of an oceangoing tug could maneuver this thing. And we don’t have a tug or a calm.”
“We don’t need either one,” Amanda replied. She waved a hand at the storm beyond the windows. “We’ve got all the motive power we need right out there. She’ll weathervane and turn into the wind by herself if we can give her half a chance. What kind of ground tackle are we holding with?”
“When Floater 1 was built, the idea was to keep all four rails of th
e platform clear for mooring and ship handling. Accordingly, each barge has a single central anchor well and capstan room, each capstan handling twelve hundred feet of chain. We’ve mostly got a mud-and-sand holding ground under us at this site, so we’re using five-ton mushroom anchors, nine of ’em. We’ve got forty-five tons of iron on the bottom, and according to the GPUs, we haven’t shifted an inch since the start of the blow.”
Amanda nodded thoughtfully, absorbing the data and applying it to the problem. “What if we lift eight of the hooks and leave number two’s down as a bottom drag. We could turn her around that?”
Gueletti shook his head. “I wouldn’t like to try it except as an absolute last resort. Like I said, we primarily have a mud and sand holding ground under us. But our sonar survey indicates we’ve got some rock ledges down there too. If we hooked the drag anchor on one of those, we could rip the whole damn capstan room right out through the bottom of the barge.”
“Then how about an array of sea anchors? We lift all the hooks and let her drift until the sea anchors bring her head around”
Again came that decisive shake of the head. “That’s out too, Captain. We’re situated on a comparatively narrow bank of shallows out here with a deepwater trench to landward. If we get blown off this holding ground, the next stop is the beach at Monrovia.”
Amanda lightly bit her lower lip, tasting the salt of the sea brine drying on it. Don’t get panicky, just work the problem. All the pieces you need are still here. You can feel it. You only have to put them together correctly. She leaned over the chart table, staring at its surface without seeing.
“Steve,” she said after a full minute. “What about the platform’s towing tackle? Do you keep that aboard?”
“Sure. Every barge stores its own towing harness in a cable tier.”
“It must be pretty heavy-gauge gear. And there must be a lot of it.”
Sea fighter Page 33
