by Ralph Kern
The impeccably dressed headwaiter, Mister Santino, stepped into Captain Solberg’s line of sight and casually scratched his nose with his right index finger. The captain’s eyes met Mister Santino’s and he gave a near-imperceptible nod.
“If you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. Duty calls. I’ll be back shortly.”
Drawing his chair back, Captain Solberg stood and placed his napkin next to his as yet-uneaten appetizer before making his way around the table to the tuxedoed waiter.
“Sir, Mister Kendricks is requesting you on the bridge,” Santino whispered discreetly.
“Is he now?” Solberg said irritably. He was about to give a cutting remark to Santino to express his annoyance at having his dinner interrupted, but instead he took a deep breath and said, “Thank you, Mister Santino.”
The captain walked out of the dining room, giving polite nods to the passengers who were enjoying their meals. Approaching the palatial entrance foyer, the glass doors slid apart and he walked onto the glorious atrium at the stern end of the long promenade. It was like passing into an entirely different ship, switching with a step from quaint and classic to cosmopolitan and high tech. Glass elevators shot up and down the huge space, twelve-decks high. The mind could barely comprehend such a structure was moving at nearly twenty knots across the sea. Solberg briefly considered taking one of the passenger elevators, but disregarded the idea. Trying to get from one place to another on a cruise ship was a nightmare for a captain. Everyone seemed to want to stop for a chat, thinking he had nothing better to do than engage in idle conversation.
Atlantica wasn’t the biggest cruise ship in the world, although she was comfortably in the top ten. She was, however, certainly the most modern. In her gargantuan hull she had every modern convenience it was possible to put inside a vessel. From theaters to nightclubs, to cinemas and even an ice rink—it was all packed efficiently into the vast hull.
The promenade stretched nearly two hundred and fifty meters along the length of the ship, dotted on either side by bars, restaurants, and shops. It was truly a high street, in which hundreds of people were visible milling around, some in their finest evening wear—after all, tonight was the ship’s formal night. Others hadn’t bothered and were still wandering around in shorts and flip-flops. Solberg gave a frown. Back when he’d started on the lines nearly three decades ago, dressing for formal night was a requirement, not an option.
Quickly ducking into a staff-only entrance before anyone could corner him, Solberg entered one of the sparse, whitewashed crew corridors that riddled the hull. These out-of-bounds spaces allowed the ship’s business to be conducted without breaking the illusion for the passengers that maintenance still needed to happen, bars needed to be refilled, and crew had to get around without being interrupted.
Reaching an elevator, he pressed the button and waited. Pulling his smartphone out of his pocket, he idly flicked through the notifications feed showing him the status of his command.
That’ll be the problem then, he thought as he saw the message giving a brief update that all the communication and navigation equipment was down.
Stepping into the elevator, it raced toward deck twelve, where the bridge was nestled beneath the ship’s gym and solarium.
He still had a long walk ahead of him to reach the bow, and it took him a couple of minutes to pace along the crew access corridor, nodding in greeting at the bustling hospitality staff who drew themselves into some semblance of attention as he swept past them.
The door to the bridge was an imposing metal hatch, as secure as that of a bank vault. Pressing his index finger to the print-reader, he waited for it to give a bleep before entering his passcode. With a rumble, the heavy doors slid open, revealing the low-lit bridge and its banks of touchscreen consoles.
“What do you have for me, Liam?” Captain Solberg said as he strode onto the bridge. He shrugged out of his spotless white dress jacket and carefully draped it over the back of his command chair.
“Apologies for disturbing your dinner, Captain,” Kendricks said from where he was stood next to the chart table with Walt Grissom. “We are having a major malfunction in, well, every piece of communications and navigation equipment we have. And that includes the compass.”
“The compass?” Solberg said in a confused tone as walked over to them. “Have you isolated the issue?”
“We haven’t even nailed down whether it’s a hardware or software fault yet. IT has been running diagnostics and they’re saying our end is fine.”
Captain Solberg glanced down at the chart table with its blinking “signal lost” symbol in the center of the interactive display. The map had frozen, showing Atlantica as being almost half-way between Nassau and her next destination, Bermuda.
“I presume inertial navigation is still dead-reckoning our position?” the captain said as he slipped off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief before replacing them.
“Negative, sir.” Kendricks and Grissom exchanged looks. “The inertial system feeds off speed and heading. We haven’t even got a heading.”
Frowning, Solberg tried to divine meaning from the error message. “But the speed and heading are entirely based on on-board equipment. Even if we have a glitch in the communications array, which is what I am suspecting right now, we should still have that.”
“Aye, but our last heading was roughly east-north-east after leaving Nassau. Now look.” Kendricks pointed at the simplest piece of equipment they had—the compass, something they never seriously thought they would ever use. It was showing west-south-west.
“Liam,” Solberg replaced his glasses. “I presume you haven’t put my ship into a handbrake turn, because that is damn near the opposite of the way we should be heading.”
“Sir,” Grissom said. “I’ve taken the liberty of pulling up the raw data control logs. We’re not showing the slightest drift on the commands to the rudder or maneuvering thrusters.”
Pinching his nose, Solberg nodded, his mind whirling. His ship didn’t know where it was, or even which way it was pointing.
“Talk to me about communications,” Solberg said finally. “What do we have there?”
“Nothing.” Kendricks opened his hands like he was supplicating to the captain. “We have nothing on VHF or sat-link. Even the automatic maintenance upload channels to Crystal Ocean are down.”
“I think it’s time to get our heads together on this one. I want all department leads in the bridge conference room in fifteen minutes.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Chapter 2 – Day 2
“We’re ready. The reset from the backup partition is good to go.” The head of IT, Tricia Farelly, looked intently at her tablet.
“Very well, Tricia. Let’s do this,” Solberg said.
The conference room was filled with Atlantica’s senior staff. Manuals, coffee mugs, and half-eaten pastries covered the table. They had spent the last few hours trying everything short of a full reset of the navigation systems. Each attempt resulted in an accusing “signal lost” message blinking from the screen.
“You sure about this, sir? I’ve not tried a hard reset while at sea,” Farelly’s tone had a hint of nervousness to it.
Leaning back in his chair, Captain Solberg gave a long sigh. “Well, we can’t exactly be any more lost, can we? Go for it.”
“Aye, sir. We’ll be down for around three minutes while the systems boot up again.”
“Very well. Liam, send a ship-net message, if you please. Give a ten-minute window from...” Captain Solberg glanced at his expensive silver watch. “0410 hours. That’ll give people a few minutes to sort themselves out before we get a systems outage.”
Kendricks gave a nod and quickly tapped out a text on his smartphone.
Fortunately, the major mechanical departments, as well as engineering and a host of other departments were headed by the people in the airy conference room, so most of the crew were expecting the outage. Still, it would be highly irritati
ng for any staff who were doing a stock count after a long night in one of the ship’s many bars to find they had lost their work.
“Sending it now,” Kendricks said. In the room, every officer’s phone gave a beep as they all received the message in unison.
We will experience a systems outage from 0410 until 0420. Please save any work now.
Taking a sip of his tepid coffee and grimacing, Captain Solberg watched the numbers on the digital clock advance toward the appointed time. Seeing the 0409 blink to 0410, he nodded at Farelly. “Do it.”
“Resetting,” Farelly responded. Tapping her screen, the lights in the conference room shut down. The room went pitch black other than luminous strips outlining the door. A second later, the reserve power kicked in and the room returned to its well-lit former self, and the only thing missing was the purr of the engines from deep within the ship.
The screen at the head of the table illuminated to show a graphic of a blue bar inching across as the ship’s primary computer systems slowly rebooted.
“Fingers crossed that we’ll be back on our way with no one the wiser,” Kendricks muttered.
Solberg gave a smile and held up his hand, his fingers crossed.
The blue bar appeared to race across the screen at some points, at other places it crawled. It seemed to take far longer than the three minutes Farelly had told them it would take, but finally a message appeared.
Systems Rebooted
“Right.” Solberg clapped his hands together and rubbed his palms as if he was warming them. He cocked his head and gave a satisfied nod as he heard the low hum of the engines starting up again. “Bring navigation up.”
Farelly tapped on the tabletop touchscreen, opening up the desired display.
Signal Lost
“For fucks sake!” Solberg barked, causing several of the people in the room to start. “Communications?”
Farelly gave a shake of her head.
“Very well.” Solberg took a deep breath, calming himself before giving a resigned sigh. “We cannot continue on like this. Executive decision time. We will come about and head back to Nassau.”
The officers glanced at each other, all undoubtedly doing the calculations in their heads of how much that would cost the cruise line.
“People, I know what you’re thinking, but we can...” Solberg’s voice trailed off. What he was seeing was surely impossible. He stood up and moved around the table to the curved window overlooking the ocean. The other officers’ eyes tracked him. “What time is sunrise supposed to be?”
“It is... 0537 today, sir,” Kendricks said, glancing at his tablet that had come back online with the ship’s other systems.
“Then will someone mind telling me why the sun is rising now?”
The other officers stood and joined Solberg at the window, watching the first light of dawn begin to creep over the horizon dead ahead of them.
“Liam,” Solberg’s voice was low. “Turn us back toward Nassau.”
“Sir, we don’t even have the compa—” Kendricks began.
“Mister Kendricks, as far as I’m aware, the sun rises in the east. Put it to our stern.”
Chapter 3 – Day 2
“Home, Steel Actual. We are in contact with ten plus dismounted and two technicals.” Sergeant Jack Cohen flinched away from the rounds impacting the dry sandstone wall he was hunkered against. The whole wall seemed to rock with the thudding strikes of the heavy 7.62 ammunition the ISIL militants’ AK-47s sprayed out. Flecks and chunks of the wall flew in every direction.
In a brief lull in the deluge of fire coming from the shattered remnants of the two-story school in which ISIL had set up their Forward Operating Base, Jack dared a glance over the bullet hole-riddled wall. The opposing sides were less than fifty meters away from each other, separated by an urban waste ground of smashed buildings and sandy open space.
“Sergeant, I’ve got Melton’s bleeding stopped, but he ain’t looking so good.” The marines already had a man down from this ambush and the squad’s medic was frantically working on his injury. He’d caught a round right in the armpit. It had sliced between the plates of armor and had done horrendous damage to the young marine’s chest. Melton lay on the dusty floor, body armor sliced open and splayed wide to expose the damage as blood pooled around him.
“Steel, Home. Thunder will be over you in two mikes. Prepare for fire mission.”
“Home, Steel Actual. That’s a roger. Status on the 9-line?” Jack shouted into the radio over the cacophony of gunfire.
“Right on Thunder’s tail.”
Goddamn it, they better be! Jack thought. Their top cover and casualty evacuation chopper should have been available in a hell of a lot less time than its taken Thunder to get their asses over here.
“Marines, we have two minutes,” Jack held up two fingers as he called up the line to the next man, who in turn passed it further up the chain.
Giving another glance over the wall, Jack saw an ISIL militant break cover, firing his rifle on rapid-fire from the hip, attempting to leapfrog closer to the marines’ position. Bringing his own rifle to bear, Jack sighted the militant through the ACOG sight and gently squeezed the trigger of his M4A1 carbine in a smooth measured rhythm.
The weapon gave a loud popping noise, and the bearded ISIL pirouetted before hitting the floor. The return fire from his comrades was savage and unrelenting. The stream of bullets from the .50 caliber machine gun bolted on the back of one of the technicals, a red dirty battered pickup truck, slammed into his cover. Jack could feel the wall disintegrating under the onslaught. The dust and dirt sprayed over Jack as he hunkered down as low as he could go, feeling and hearing the hiss of rounds penetrating the wall all around him.
A loud “thunk” came from one of the marine’s underslung M203 launchers. The grenade impacted the cabin of the truck, giving pause to the cannon behind. Whether the operator was killed, stunned, or had merely ran out of ammunition, Jack didn’t care. The fire had stopped and he was very happy about that fact. He glanced down, checking himself over, almost in disbelief that he had not been hit.
“Steel, Thunder. We are thirty seconds away. We have your beacons. Begin your designation, over,” the voice on the radio crackled.
Through the ringing of his ears from the exchange of fire, Jack could hear the dull beat of helicopter blades. Looking to the east, he saw two specks in the intensely bright mid-day sky. The AH-64E Apache gunships, their top-cover, had arrived.
“Thunder, Steel Actual. Your mission is the building fifty meters due west of our position. Looks like an old school. Identifying marker is an old playground to its due north. We have ten plus in and around that location and one effective technical. We are danger close, I repeat danger closer,” Jack shouted into his radio.
“Roger that, you are danger close, Steel. Fifty meters puts you inside our minimum safe target box.”
“I hear you, Thunder, but I need to get one urgent surgical out ASAP. I have no opportunity to disengage at this time. I need that position servicing and now,” Jack called.
“Roger that, I have the school. Stay down.”
Jack slouched so low he was lying on his back as the two ugly olive-green helicopters roared overhead, the downdraft covering him with even more dirt and debris. The fire from ISIL eased on Jack’s squad as the militants began firing into the air, hoping to bring down the heavily armed and armored war machines, a trophy they undoubtedly thought would earn them seventy-two virgins if it cost them their lives.
“Servicing your targets. Shot out,” the calm Texas accent of the pilot announced.
A stream of bullets surged out of the cannon slung below the nose of the helicopter, slamming into the one remaining technical, tearing it into bullet-riddled shreds.
“Shot out,” the call came again as the Apache circled laterally, wheeling around the target area, keeping its fire heading away from the beleaguered marine squad. A wall two militants had been ducking behind simply disintegrated in a clo
ud of sand-colored debris and red mist.
“Shot out.” The lower floor of the long-abandoned school seemed to erupt as the heavy 30mm cannon rounds ripped through the building.
“Shot out.”
Jack closed his eyes, hunkering down as far as he could away from the fury of the devastating vengeance the Apaches were wreaking on the insurgents.
“Steel, Thunder. I see no further movement. Confirm, over.”
Glancing back over the wall, Jack could see the bloody remnants of the ISIL group that had ambushed them. Nothing appeared to be alive. Jack couldn’t even believe that anything could be alive after the pummeling Thunder had given out.
“Thunder, Steel Actual. Can’t confirm but looks clear.”
“Steel, Thunder. We are providing over-watch. Looks like your rides here. Out.”
“Thank you, Thunder,” Jack breathed. He would be able to buy the pilots a beer later, but for now brevity meant the radio net had to be kept clear of such pleasantries.
The thumping noise of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter began to drown out the engines of the more distant orbiting Apaches as it got closer. Settling down in a clear area in the devastated urban waste ground a hundred meters back from their position, the loadmaster, dimly visible through the cloud of dust the rotor blades were kicking up, began waving them over.
“Marines, back to the Hawk. Melton first,” Jack shouted over the noise.
His squad gave a chorus of “affirmatives” and began retreating back to the safety of their ride out of the hellhole they were fighting in.
Jack kept his position, listening as each of his men confirmed they were aboard. Looking through the telescopic ACOG sight of his rifle, he gave a last sweep of the building before picking himself up and starting to turn toward the waiting Black Hawk.
The corner of his eye caught a movement in one of the upper windows of the school. The bright light of the Syrian sun contrasted with the darkness inside the structure. Jack began bringing his rifle to bear on the window.
