I look around. The Sophie is a really old ship. This is good for me. On the bridge, there’s a steering wheel, throttle control, a couple of buttons and switches, and an instrument display; all in all, pretty self-explanatory. A newer freighter would be packed with technology, joysticks and flat screens. No layman could take control just like that.
Here it’s easy: steering and throttle control, basically like any other boat. I turn the wheel as fast as I can to the right. Sorry, I mean “starboard,” of course.
Allegedly the captain of the Titanic had made a crucial mistake. People say that he turned the steering wheel and simultaneously gave full power in reverse. The propellers rotated backwards and took the pressure off the rudder blade, so that the ship was virtually disabled and drove straight into the iceberg.
I never thought I might ever get into a similar situation, but now I try the reverse argument and give full throttle.
Theoretically, the propellers should now provide a huge amount of water pressure on the transverse positioned rudder blade and turn the ship. In theory.
In practice it works well, but unfortunately way too slowly.
Ships behave differently compared to cars. When driving a curve, the angular momentum comes from the stern; pretty much like a car in reverse gear.
Our course does change, but it’s more likely that the tail moves leftward in order to turn the ship to the right. But I need the entire freighter to move to the right!
I need to turn faster to reach the desired collision course, but I’m going to be late. Right now, it looks as if we’ll just pass astern of the other freighter. Shit, I should have turned the rudder before binding the captain and the navigator.
I look around frantically. In front of the throttle there are two levers mounted at right angles to the throttle. These can only be the controls for the bow thruster. A bow thruster is a propeller that is installed in the front bow, but not in the same direction, rather across from it. When parking in and out sideways, you’re able to push the bow of the ship towards or away from the dock at a right angle. Large ships have several of them: two levers, two bow thrusters, I suppose.
This is my chance. I press both levers to the right in the hope that the bow thruster will push the nose of the ship to the right.
Excitedly, I run to the left side and look along the ship’s side. White spray shoots to the left at the very front; the bow thrusters are working!
Satisfied, I wait for the effect. The freighter does indeed turn much faster now. I estimate that the two ships will gradually meet on a collision course. The captain of the other freighter seems to repeat the Titanic mistake. At his rear, a white foam swell appears sideways at the vessel wall, a sure sign that his machine is running backwards.
A freighter of this size needs several miles to stop. Looks almost like my plan might work.
Time for me to disappear. I pull back the throttle levers of the bow thrusters to half power so that our freighter does not rotate too far and then run back to the windows at the rear. These are unfortunately so covered with salt that I see absolutely nothing. Hopefully Steve is cruising out there, waiting for me. Shooting at the windows with rubber bullets probably won’t help; I need to find something to smash the glass.
I start looking for a suitable item; maybe there’s a fireman’s axe on the bridge. Suddenly, I notice out of the corner of my eye a steel rod dashing towards me. I manage to pull my head out of its way just in time. This saves my head, but the iron hits my shoulder with full force. I jump to the side and turn myself towards the attacker. None other than Marc Andrews is swinging his stick against me.
Damn, what happened to Steve? Andrews takes advantage of my shock a second time: I sidestep too late and the bar crashes again on my left shoulder. Thank goodness Andrews is right-handed. Despite the pain, I turn my left side towards him to repel his strikes and try to attack him with my right.
When he hauls off for a third time, this opens his cover for a second. I twist around, using the full momentum of my turn and hit him with my fist right in the face. His head snaps back and he staggers backwards. The rod falls out of his hand, but he recovers amazingly fast. Sure enough, this is not his first fight.
For a moment, we are eyeball to eyeball and stare at each other. I struggle for breath, but Andrews grants me no rest: he starts running towards me and makes to strike. I lift my left arm protectively and notice too late that he’s just faking. Instead of punching me, he kicks against my leg with full force. Fortunately, he doesn’t hit my knee as he intended, but my lower leg. However, the force is enough to knock me down. I hit forcibly against the steel floor and instantly curl sideways. That saves me as Andrews' next kick misses me. I turn behind him and kick as hard as I can at the back of his knees. This lays him out as well. Somehow I manage to punch him in the stomach while getting up. It seems his belly area is still somewhat sensitive thanks to the barrage of rubber bullets it absorbed earlier. Looks like I found his soft spot.
Barely standing upright, I'm trying to finish him with a well-aimed kick in the face. But he sees it coming and rolls under the chart table.
At that moment, a helicopter flies low over the bridge. I don’t have time to figure out how the army got here so fast. General Miller estimated it would take at least a half hour. Bob’s kerosene bomb only hit about 10 minutes ago. Either the General sent the army on suspicion, or Andrews and me have already been fighting for 20 minutes, which doesn’t seem possible.
Damn, now with my mind on the damn helicopter, I notice the flying, cast-iron ashtray a moment too late. It hits me on the forehead, and for a moment I see nothing but some bright stars and find myself on the floor again.
Andrews dives on me with the iron bar back in his hands. He swings the bar and... stops!
He’s ready to strike, his muscles are tense, and he stares straight into my eyes. I hold still. One wrong move and that's it.
"Greenall, I ..."
He can’t proceed. In mid-sentence, with his mouth still open, his head suddenly explodes. The left side of his head shifts ever so slightly, while the right side gets blown up from the inside, blood and brain matter shooting out.
Only after Andrews collapses on me do I hear the shot. A bullet is faster than sound; you can’t hear it coming. This is what the soldiers say.
Andrews won’t hear anything ever again. Just above his left ear, at the entry point of the bullet, there is a small hole. On the right side, where the bullet exited, significantly more is lacking.
"Mr. Greenall! Are you okay? My God, looks like I got here just in time!"
The voice sounds familiar, but at the moment I can’t identify it. Only after I laboriously roll Andrews' lifeless body from my own, I turn my head and see the shooter: Robert Stice.
"He wanted to kill you; a second later and your head would have been mud!"
"Yeah ... well ... uh," I need a moment to collect my thoughts first.
I look from Stice to Andrews' dead body and back to Stice.
"What… why… where did you come from?"
"By helicopter. It wasn’t easy to figure out what was going on from above… a burning freighter on a collision course with another ship. I chose to land on the roof of this ship to find out why it was turning. Just in time to safe your life, I would say!"
Collision course! For a moment, I totally forgot about the other freighter. There can’t be much space left between us. I jump up and hop, as well as I can, to the window. I see the other freighter about 200 yards next to us and then immediately drop to the ground. There are at least ten people with machine guns over at the bow, and they immediately open fire when they see me at the window.
I slide roughly down the steel sidewall to the ground where I’m safe from the bullets. The windows above me burst and a shower of glass splinters patters down on me - not safety glass. I crawl away from the wall towards Stice, who also took cover here. I come away with only a few minor cuts. The guys keep shooting, dozens of bullets whistle above ou
r heads.
"Are they mad?" Stice yells.
This kind of puzzles me. What did he expect?
"Let’s get out of here!" I exclaim.
We crawl out of the open door on the side opposite the other freighter. Stice scans the sky.
"Forget your helicopter. We have to jump!”
Robert Stice plunges overboard first; his years with the Special Forces have hardened him. I jump second. During the fall, I see a boat racing towards us. Thank God or whoever: Steve is here. When I surface, he’s almost next to me. He takes Stice aboard, then me. I need help to climb into the boat since my shoulder is pretty battered.
"Where did you come from?"
"I kept waiting next to the Sophie. When the other boys came within range, they started shooting. I had no choice but to take cover behind this ship and hope that you show up."
Steve accelerates violently.
Before I can ask any more questions, a penetrating metallic roar makes us wince: a creaking and cracking, dull and screaming at the same time. Deafening. The Sophie gets bent like a banana right in front of us. The other ocean liner crashes into its broadside and burrows into it. It's like one skyscraper taking another skyscraper’s right of way. Ships have no crumple zone; they aren’t designed for accidents. Despite the low speed, massive damage ensues.
If a car crashes against a house, the energy is absorbed by the deforming body of the vehicle. The car gets smashed while the house hardly suffers any damage at all. If a tank were to hit the same house at the same speed, it would easily drive through the wall and into the living room. In an accident, there’s always a weaker one that yields to the stronger. It’s not yet clear which freighter is the weaker in the current scenario.
The roar doesn’t decrease; on the contrary, there’s a constant noise of bending metal and an ear-splitting cracking and popping and scrunching.
The entire freighter bends and takes the shape of a boomerang. It’s now moving sideways, the water pressure on the one side and the immense gross register tonnage from the other side fight against the construction of the freighter. Steel bars burst or get severely bent.
Containers from both ships fall down and crash into the water in an eruption of white foam.
It takes quite a while before the noise subsides and the two ships gradually lose speed.
We take a look at the other freighter, of course, from a safe distance. This one is at least 20 to 30 yards shorter than before. The entire ship’s nose is stuck in the sidewall of the "Sophie" and it’s now pushed together like an accordion. The bulb - this is the ship's nose below the water’s surface - worked almost as a battering ram and tore open a long, wide gash in the Sophie’s outer wall.
There’s no sign of the crews, neither the extinguishing ones, nor the shooting ones. Judging by the condition of the ships, it would be surprising if there were no deaths and injuries.
What a sight: two already rusty freighters wedged into each other, one a good bit shorter than before, and the other deformed, shot and partially burning. Both ships consolidated into a large chunk of steel, barely visible where one freighter begins and the other ends, as well as a track of white foamy water and floating containers. Pearl Harbor must have looked similar after the Japanese attack.
I take Steve's radio: "General, send helicopters, ships and a rescue team here. The freighters collided. They might soon sink, so we need to tow them into the next port. Several containers went overboard. But I’m not sure if they were ones containing weapons or drugs. Those containers must be recovered before they sink." Before I let go of the button on the radio, I add, “Oh and General, please send two rescue teams. Bob must have made an emergency landing into the sea somewhere between here and Maui."
To my surprise, it’s not the General who answers: "I don’t need Uncle Sam for swimming lessons. I’m already grown up and can take care of myself."
"Bob," I shout: "How, where...?"
"Look up." He replies.
I detach my gaze from the floating junkyard and look around. Right above us, a helicopter hovers with the inscription "Sun Helicopters," Kiara's company. The sliding door is open and Bob and his daughter are waving to us. The control stick gets operated by someone I don’t know, probably a fellow pilot.
The noise of the crashing freighters drowned out the rotors, so we didn’t notice the helicopter until now. I emphasize "crashing" and not "crashed," because the accident is still in full swing. The freighters are still moving and the creaking, scrunching and banging wails on.
The General answers, "We’ll take over now. Battleships, combat helicopters and the Coast Guard are already on their way, since a defect in Bob's aircraft has caused the uncontrolled loss of his auxiliary tanks."
Defect? What is Miller talking about? I’m about to clarify that Bob is the hero of the day, when I meet the equally surprised and icy gaze of Robert Stice.
"All right, is it okay if we take the helicopter to go home? The Army can surely take care of our inflatables. I want only one thing: home!"
"No problem, guys!"
"Wait a minute," Stice interrupts, as I notify Bob to pick us up. "What’s going on here?"
I follow our official version, but have to adapt it a bit to fit the events that just occurred:
"Steve and I were here fishing, when we received a radio message from the stunt pilot. He had technical problems and feared he would crash. In order to avoid exploding during an emergency landing at sea, he dropped his auxiliary tank. But it apparently jammed and didn’t separate from the aircraft. Therefore, the pilot had to pull up just before hitting the water. He intended to touch down near the freighter in order to get saved by the crew. Then the accident happened: when he pulled up the aircraft, the tank finally detached and hit a freighter. Steve and I separated. Steve followed the plane to rescue the pilot and I drove to the freighter to see if I could help. You know the rest. Andrews tried to kill me, and you shot Andrews."
"This is the most insane story I've ever heard," Robert Stice replies, and somehow I have to agree with him. In order to prevent any further questions, I switch to the offense-is-the-best-defense strategy and start to question him before he can say anything more.
"And what the hell are you doing here?"
Stice is a professional and, of course, he prepared a story as well. I’m sure he’s an outstanding soldier, but his acting career would have been over quickly. I don’t buy his well-rehearsed text:
"After all the trouble that was caused, not the least by you and your friend, I decided to get my own idea of what’s going on. I knew about Andrews' boat trip today and wanted to keep an eye on him. The charges against him and, consequently, against my company, are too serious not to investigate. So I decided to observe Andrews. When I arrived here, however, everything was in chaos already. Why on earth did the freighter turn into a direct collision course with the other?"
"Absolutely no idea," I shrug, and with all the confidence of being a more suitable actor than my counterpart, I ask Stice if he wants to fly with us or use his own helicopter. His helicopter is hovering directly behind ours by now.
Fortunately, Stice prefers his own bird. Flying with us, he might come up with questions like: "Why did you and Steve go fishing with two separate boats?"; "Fishing, at a water depth of several thousand feet?"; "Why is the pontoon drifting ownerless over the ocean, a few miles away from the freighters?"; "Why are you even still here and not in Europe?"; "You claim to be fishing here while your friend just happens to be taking an aerobatic flight and accidentally gets technical problems; and on top of everything, right where Andrews, whom you’ve been following for weeks, just happens to be traveling with his towed convoy?" Such questions, well, they are currently not easy to answer. We need to set up with a story that is beyond doubt before there is a court hearing.
On the other hand, I do have just as many questions that could get Stice into trouble again. Looking at it that way, it’s best for both of us to fly home separately.
; Steve and I enter the helicopter.
"Bob, you crazy dog! What the hell was that?"
"I didn’t see how else we could possibly stop the freighters. But if I would have told you about my plan, you would have talked me out of it."
"For sure. But what if we don’t find any weapons or drugs?"
"Andrews confirmed it, otherwise I wouldn’t have done the deed."
"Andrews... well, but he only confirmed it to me. I didn’t pass the information, did I?!"
"You apparently pushed down your radio’s talk button inside your pocket. We listened in and recorded the conversation."
Holy cow. I need a few moments to get over that one.
The pilot works at Sunshine and is friends with Kiara. Maybe he also has a crush on her; doesn’t matter. In any case, he was so cooperative, that he’s been waiting at the airport since 5 a.m. this morning in case we needed him. Kiara and Bob develop this incredible plan B and left us, as well as the General, in the dark.
Half way to Hawaii Page 26
