"Yes, Ma’am," Gellar said as he peered up.
"Very well—bring ‘im up."
"You heard her, c’mon,” Gellar said as he led Reese up the stairs to the pilot house.
“Clear decks,” a voice called out behind them as the crew readied the cutterboat for redeployment.
Reese climbed the metal steps to the young woman, who appeared to be half his age—she could have been one of Amber's friends—waiting for him outside a hatch in the pilot house. He cleared his throat, but she ignored him for a moment, focused on the sight she viewed through a pair of massive nautical binoculars attached to the railing. She kept one hand on the binoculars and turned back to him.
"That was some fancy sailing you did back there, mister. Really pulled our bacon out of the fire. Thank you for that."
Reese shrugged. "I, uh...didn't want to get involved at first—“
She nodded. "That was smart." She turned back to the half-sunk yacht and the rescue efforts as her crew in the cutterboat raced to pull people from the water and the yacht continued to be consumed by flames. "Times like these, it's hard to choose which side to join. But I can honestly say I'm thankful you chose ours."
"Did I choose the right one?" Reese asked. He glanced over the railing at Intrepid and Tiberia, lashed together and floating, adrift in a sea of debris and wreckage a hundred yards away from Sailfish. The two sailboats looked tiny—almost like models. The figures that moved around on their decks…it was hard to believe those were his friends, the only people in the world who cared about him other than his family, still 800 miles away.
The officer turned and stuck out her hand in a formal gesture. "Lieutenant Commander Julia Ortiz. I'm captain of the Sailfish.”
Reese shook her hand, and though her hand was delicate and smooth, the grip was strong and confident. "Reese Lavelle. I'm Intrepid’s skipper."
“Good name for that little pistol boat you got. Pardon my saying so, sir,” Ortiz said, “but you look like you've been through a lot. You folks okay?”
Reese found that comment ironic, considering the bags under her bloodshot eyes, but he told her about the tsunami and how he and Ben came ashore in Maine. He explained linking up with Jo and how they’d survived the riots in Ellsworth. He left nothing out, and once the words began flowing, he found it almost therapeutic to unleash the burden of everything that had happened. From the long walk south through Belfast and Liberty, and the conflicts with the wannabe security guards, to the drive to Boston and the subsequent gang violence that led to Jo almost getting killed…he finished up with Byron, Libby and Tony in Boston and filled Ortiz in on their misadventures in Newport and Long Island.
“We just want to go home,” he finished, with a shrug.
"So, that was you at Camp Echo?" Ortiz asked with a raised eyebrow.
"What do you mean…?”
"Oh, it's all over the comms nets. There's some kind of rebellion underway on Long Island. Got kicked off at Camp Echo,” Ortiz said with a smile. “Bunch of rogue soldiers up there."
"So, they weren't following orders?” asked Reese.
“Uhhh no," Ortiz said with a genuine smile, white teeth flashing against her olive complexion. "Those guys have been a thorn in our side for the past week. Every time one of our boats gets too close, they start takin’ fire. Those jokers have been stealing every private watercraft on Long Island. Nobody knows what they're doing, but I guarantee you it's not sanctioned."
Reese nodded. “So, what happened?"
Ortiz laughed. "Well, the camp burned to the ground and there was a general riot, and most of the soldiers seem to have scattered to the wind—that’s all the navy told us from their overflights. I was going to ask you what happened since you were on the ground…”
Reese sighed and leaned against the cold steel railing along the observation deck. "Commander Ortiz, you get me a glass of water and you can ask me whatever questions you want."
“Deal,” Ortiz said with a thoughtful grin. "Hey Gellar, can you get us a couple bottles of water?"
"Ma'am," the medic said with a casual salute from the main deck. He disappeared under the pilot house, out of sight.
"We busted out of there yesterday at sunset…” Reese said, as he stared at Intrepid.
“How did you get out?” she asked, leaning on the yellow railing outside the pilot house. “We’ve heard from a few people that managed to escape—Camp Echo was like a fortress…so I’ve heard…”
“Well, we set a little distraction fire—“
“I’ll say! What’d you do, blow up their fuel and ammo dump?”
Reese grinned sheepishly. “I…ah…” he scratched his head. “I may have set fire to a cache of toilet paper with a can of tuna in a microwave.”
Ortiz blinked. For a long moment, she just stared at him, then burst out laughing, her guffaws caused crewmembers on decks below to pause in their tasks and look up questioningly.
Reese cleared his throat. “So…ah…after that, we picked up Tony—“
“Wait, wait, is this the part where you guys assaulted the beach?”
Reese paused. “What? How did you—”
“We picked up their radio chatter—they had all kinds of traffic last night about some gunboat tearing up the beach. Said it had to be the navy making a move…”
Reese grinned again. “We...may have had something to do with that. Jo doesn’t like getting shot at, so…” He shrugged. “She returned fire.”
Ortiz laughed. “Oh, I can’t wait to tell Captain Brighton about this. Okay…so, after you destroyed Camp Echo, the most notorious installation on Long Island, then pretended to be a naval gunship, what else did you redneck commandos get up to last night?”
“About a pot of coffee,” Reese muttered. “We sailed all through the night to get down here. I knew the city was going to be bad,” Reese said as he leaned on the railing and looked across the harbor toward New York. “I didn't expect to sail right into the middle of a naval battle, though.”
Ortiz looked at Reese and grinned. "You think this was a battle?” she asked as she gestured at the half-sunk yacht. Below them on the main deck, men yelled and threw lines and life preservers to the people still in the water. Ortiz scoffed. “You ain't seen nothing.“ She pointed at the dull gray warship in the distance. “See that? That's Normandy. Mmmhmmm, Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser. Some idiots up in Battery Park started firing homemade mortars and stuff, taking pot shots at her when she first pulled into harbor. Man, she lit them up." Ortiz whistled in obvious admiration. "Never seen anything like it…”
Reese cleared his throat. "I don't mean to be rude, but can you please tell me what the heck is going on around here? I haven't had any sleep, my friend’s been shot, my boat’s full of bullet holes, I used up half my gas trying to get through this war zone…all I want to do is get home. I just need to know what's going on, so we don't sail into another nightmare.”
Ortiz braced her feet on the gently pitching deck and clapped her hands behind her back. "Well, Mr. Lavelle, you’re not gonna have much luck with that. All down the coast is pretty much a war zone. Everything's falling apart."
"I know the tsunami was bad, but—“
“All due respect, sir, no you don't. You’ve only seen a little bit up here. Boston yeah, they got smacked pretty good, same with Newport. New York City was saved a lot of damage—everything that's going on here?" She said with a nod toward Gravesend Bay. Sporadic gunfire still popped and echoed in the distance. “This didn't have much to do with the tsunami. Sure, they took some damage, had waves up about 20 or 30 feet high, but Long Island blocked most of the damage. East coast of the Big Island is pretty much trashed. But Manhattan…they had some record flooding, but the waters receded quick. Everything that's going on now, this was all caused by the idiots in town thinking they could be warlords. Everything went right down the toilet within a matter of days."
Reese sighed. "Nine meals to anarchy…”
Ortiz blinked and looked at him. "
Excuse me?"
Reese shrugged. "My wife was always talking about it. She said civilization was only nine meals away from collapse at any given point. Three days." He explained. "You take away water, food, and reliable access to medicine…and any normal person will go absolutely crazy and do whatever it takes to get food and water for their family. I never thought…I’d hoped that it would take a little longer…”
Ortiz crossed her arms. "Well, unfortunately I think your wife was right. It was about 4 or 5 days before we got called in. But by then it was too late—the locals had been overwhelmed. Everything had already fallen apart."
"Commander, do you...“ Reese began, then he swallowed. His mouth had gone dry despite being splashed with seawater all morning. "South Carolina—Charleston—do you know anything? My family lives just north of town—we have a house, but it’s…” His words faded as he saw the look of anguish settle on Ortiz's face.
"I'm sorry, sir…” she said quietly.
"What do you mean?"
She looked away for a moment. "I don't know how to tell you…” When she looked back, her eyes were wet. "Charleston's...gone."
Reese sagged against the railing. He didn't even hear Chief Gellar approach up the stairs. Gellar nudged Reese with the bottle of water. "You okay?"
"His family was in Charleston," Ortiz said quietly.
Gellar exhaled. He handed Ortiz a bottle then turned and left without a word. Reese couldn't blame him. What could anyone say to a man who’d just found out that the closest city to his house had been wiped off the face of the earth?
He'd known—he'd always known. As soon as he saw the destruction in Bar Harbor, Reese had dealt with the nagging worry in the back of his mind that Charleston had suffered a similar fate. Once they'd reached Boston and discovered that the biggest city in New England had been brought to its knees by the tsunami, he knew there'd been little hope for South Carolina, nestled as it was in the low country so exposed to the ocean. But he hadn’t heard official word, and that had allowed a sprig of hope to stay alive in his heart…until Ortiz laid bare the fear that clenched at his soul.
Charleston was gone.
Reese blinked away tears and stared up at the smoke-filled sky. Just because Charleston had been destroyed didn't necessarily mean that Cami and Amber were lost as well. He cleared his throat. "We live—“ he said in a husky voice. He stopped, closed his eyes, and started again. “Our house is something like 15 or 16 miles from the ocean…I hope…I hope that was enough.”
"I'm sure it was," Ortiz said quickly. "From everything that we've been able to tell over the last couple weeks, the waves petered out after a dozen or so miles. Sometimes they went a lot further up rivers, but for the most part it was the coastal towns that took the biggest punch to the face.” She cracked the lid on her bottle and took a long pull of water. "The real surprising part is that the rest of the country fell apart so fast."
“Wait, what? What do you mean the rest of the country?” He swallowed. “Are we at war or something?”
Ortiz shrugged. "Nobody knows what happened to the president and most of Congress. Everybody was taken by surprise…NSA, CIA—everybody was blind. Washington is gone. One of the guys on the president's cabinet was sworn in as the president—until they can find the real one—and he's trying to kick-start the country out in Denver, but…” She sighed. "We're all just trying to do what we can to hold things together. The military's going in six different directions, so the Coast Guard is just knuckling down and doing what we always do—protect boaters, guard the coast, and keep the peace on the water."
Reese looked over Ortiz's shoulder at the flaming, smoking hulk of the luxury yacht. "Doesn't look like there was much peace around here lately…”
Ortiz snorted. "We’ve been having problems with gang violence in Manhattan. Once the army arrived and started evacuating survivors to the mainland, the ones that stayed behind pretty much had free reign of the place. When you think about it," Ortiz said, her head inclined. "The waves destroyed everything that was on the ground level and maybe the first four stories. There's plenty of buildings in New York that are a lot taller than just one or two floors.”
She took another drink and leaned on the railing. “That’s a lot of stuff left behind. To make matters worse, we had hundreds of thousands of civilians decide that they didn't want to leave that valuable stuff. So now we’ve got people trapped on Manhattan—on top of gangs and warlords fighting each other in the streets in a post-apocalyptic free-for-all. On top of all that, people are trying to escape on their own, any way they can…because they're starving." She shook her head. "That's what was going on when you guys showed up—we were trying to coordinate a civilian evacuation.”
Reese shook his head. “Gangs? Warlords? What is this, the Dark Ages or New York?”
Ortiz nodded. “Maybe the Dark Ages of New York.” She exhaled. “One of the worst thugs settin’ himself up as a boss got wind of the evacuation and tried to cut them off. I don’t know what they were planning on doing with all those people if they managed to capture them—it's not like they're all hauling gold jewelry in suitcases or anything…most of the people that were on those ferries only had the clothes on their backs.” She turned and leaned back against the railing. "I just don't know…”
Reese downed half of his water bottle and took another glance at Tiberia and Intrepid, still tied together a hundred yards to starboard. Beyond the two sailboats, the skyscrapers of Manhattan remained shrouded in smoke and fire. How many people were still alive and had watched the fighting behind windows in those upper stories? How many people had decided it was worth the risk to stay behind when the rest of the island panicked and left in the wake of the tsunamis?
Reese turned back to Ortiz. "You’re doing the best you can, commander. You’re trying to save lives—that's more than most people have done since the tsunami hit."
She turned and offered him a tired smile. "You’re not doing so bad yourself. If you guys hadn't shown up when you did and popped off with that .50—what the heck are you doing with a machine gun mounted on a sailboat in the first place? Talk about some redneck engineering…”
Reese laughed and held up his hands. "Don't look at me—that was them crazy National Guard boys on Long Island. They took the boats, tried to put us into work gangs, then put a turret on Intrepid. They hacked a hole through the main foredeck on Tiberia and put in seating."
“Seating? Like a troop transport?"
Reese nodded. "Exactly. They used wooden picnic table benches of all things, bolted them into the hold. Absolutely wrecked a pretty boat. I’m surprised she still sails. We have no idea what they were planning…”
Ortiz nodded. "We might, though—heard rumors they were making raids on Manhattan. I think they were planning on using your boats to slip across and steal supplies from the abandoned buildings. If anybody would've been able to hold off the gangs to extract loot, it would've been those soldiers."
"Well…” Reese said as he scratched at his head.
"You did good," Ortiz said with a smile. "There's people in Manhattan that still have food today because you guys stopped those rogue soldiers in their tracks. Everybody's talking about it. I'm just glad I got to be the one to meet you first."
Reese shrugged. "Well, we didn't set out to do anything except escape.”
Ortiz looked up at the smoke that swirled in the sky. Her mood darkened, and she remained quiet for a long moment. "You said you’re headed to Baltimore? You’re not going all the way to South Carolina?"
"Oh, I am—but Jo and I promised to help Byron, Libby, and Tony make it to Baltimore first." Reese shrugged. “They’re good people. They needed help, and we needed a ride. They had two sailboats…so…I offered to sail one to Baltimore for them. Jo and I will have to figure out how to get to South Carolina after that."
Ortiz continued to look up at the smoke that swirled in the sky. "Well, Lavelle, you’re gonna have more troubles than raiders to worry about if you head that f
ar south. There’s a nasty tropical system headed toward the Carolinas."
"Say what now?" Reese said.
"I haven't read the latest updates,” Ortiz said quickly, “I’ve had a few more important things to worry about than hurricanes a thousand miles away, you know?" She turned and looked at Reese. "Last I heard, it was still a tropical storm, but the navy forecasters were predicting landfall somewhere between Jacksonville and the Outer Banks.”
Reese exhaled and stared at the pressed steel decking below his feet. "Are you freaking kidding me?" he muttered. He put his hands on his hips and looked up. “How much time?"
Ortiz crossed her arms. "Hard to say. When the tidal wave hit—“
“Tsunami,” Reese corrected gently.
She looked at him. “And caused all the cascading failures—National Hurricane Center is based out of Miami, they went dark when the waves hit and no one’s heard anything since—everybody’s guessing now.”
Reese narrowed his eyes. "You're a sailor. What’s your guess? How long do I have?”
Ortiz sighed. "I don't like that you’re puttin’ me on the spot like this, Lavelle. I’m not a frickin’ forecaster," she muttered.
"Trust me, I'm not gonna hold you personally responsible, but I gotta have a ballpark figure. He gestured toward Tiberia and Intrepid with his head. “I need to know if we should get going now, or if we can take time to repair the boats first? Please—I’m begging you—what's your best guess at landfall? Are we talking hours, days, or…?”
Ortiz looked at him square in the face. "Okay, we'll skip the civilian BS we've been givin’ everybody who asks. Sailor to sailor."
Reese nodded.
She frowned. “It's got the potential to be a bad one. The Gulf Stream is like an oven this year and the currents and winds are all favorable.”
“How bad?” Reese asked, his voice tight.
A grim look came across Ortiz’s face and her mouth compressed into a tight line. “You need to hurry."
Chapter 7
Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow Page 5
