“Let’s think this situation through logically,” Jorge said.
Lopez leaned back against the table and folded his arms. His smile faded into a smirk.
“The first question we need to answer is whether the Americans are in control of the ship,” Jorge said. “It’s possible that the entire boarding party has been eliminated, and the ship is drifting, dead in the water. But I don’t think so. A boarding party from a U.S. Navy warship would be armed, unlike the crew of the Latin Star, and would be able to deal with El Callado. So it would be prudent to assume that the boarding party is in control of the ship.”
Lopez looked amused.
“The second assumption we should make is that the American officer is not a fool,” Jorge said. “To underestimate any opponent would be a serious mistake.” He looked at Lopez, hoping he got the double meaning.
“I agree,” Lopez said, returning the look.
“Given those two key assumptions,” Jorge said, “it’s safe to assume that the American officer will try to get the ship under way to save it and his crew from the storm.”
“And then?” Lopez asked.
“If he succeeds in that, he will simply ride out the storm and wait to be rescued, lacking the necessary skills to navigate the ship to port.”
“Your logic is faulty, Señor Cordoba,” Lopez said. “When the American officer sees the cargo and realizes who owns the ship, he will know that to sit and wait would mean almost certain death. Therefore, if he could not navigate the ship, he would try to make a run for it and hope he is spotted by friendly forces before he is spotted by our planes.”
Jorge nodded, reluctantly. The little troll was right. “But in which direction would he run?” he mused aloud.
“Obviously, he would head toward the nearest land,” Lopez said,” and that would be east, toward the coast of Peru. If the ship is 250 miles off the coast, we will have ample time to intercept and land a crew aboard by helicopter. The boarding party will, of course, have to be disposed of, which can be done cleanly on an isolated ship at sea.” Lopez’s dark eyes seemed to glow at the prospect.
“Very well,” Jorge said. “If we can’t locate the ship and take control before the storm moves in, we’ll concentrate our search efforts in this area.” He drew a circle around the area between the coast of Peru and Lopez’s grease-penciled spot on the map.
“As you wish, Señor Cordoba. I will transmit your instructions to the pilots.” Lopez walked over to the console of radio operators on the other side of the room.
Jorge remained standing by the map table, looking at the grease spot on the vast field of blue, his mind filled with thoughts about this American naval officer who held the fate of the organization in his hands. With the rank of lieutenant, Jorge reasoned, the American officer must be about the same age as himself. He wondered how the young lieutenant would cope with El Callado, the savage mudo Ayala had placed aboard the ship. Jorge had argued against using this unproven beast to guard such an important shipment, and he had been right. Loyalties ran deep in Colombia.
And if he survived El Callado, Jorge wondered what the reaction of the lieutenant would be when he saw the cash. Three hundred fifty million U.S. dollars. It was more money than a naval officer would see in 10,000 lifetimes. He smiled at the thought.
But most of all, Jorge wondered if the young lieutenant had the skills to keep the ancient ship afloat, to save it for the organization and for the future of Don Gallardo’s children. If he succeeded, the descendants of Don Augusto Gallardo would be eternally grateful to the unknown American officer. Candles would be lit for him at mass, and he would be well remembered in death.
Jorge looked up as Enrique Lopez approached. “Your visit has brought good fortune, Señor Cordoba.” His scarred face was pulled into his familiar smile. “We have a sighting.”
Blake unlocked the louvered door to stateroom number one with the ring of keys he’d found in the captain’s cabin and leaned into it, cracking it free from what appeared to be a dozen layers of white paint. The wooden door, decorated with an oval porcelain tag bearing a faded number one, gave way with a shudder, releasing a rush of musty-smelling air. He stepped inside and glanced at the 1930s oriental-style decor, struck by how out of place it looked on a cargo ship. He opened a brass porthole, admitting a stream of fresh air, and walked over to a small writing desk affixed to the bulkhead.
Frank Kozlewski stepped in behind him. “Looks like a Persian whorehouse.” He wrinkled his nose and sniffed. “Smells like one, too.”
Blake ignored him. The chief was going to be difficult; he’d been having second thoughts about getting the ship under way since the weather had started to improve. Blake sat down at the desk and flipped to a clean sheet of the yellow tablet he’d retrieved from the chart room. He drew a rough outline of the bow of a ship, followed by a series of connected boxes, four to starboard and four to port. He numbered them one through eight - even numbers port and odd numbers starboard - beginning with the forwardmost cabin on the starboard side and ending with the aft cabin on the port side. He began writing names in each of the boxes, beginning with his own name in box number one.
Kozlewski peered over Blake’s shoulder. “Drawing pictures?”
“I need to know where everyone is. You’re in number three behind me, Sergeant Rivero’s in number five and Doc Jones is in number seven on the starboard side,” Blake said, writing in names as he went. “On the port side, Kelly and the girl are in stateroom number two, just across from us, Sparks is behind them in number four . . .” He paused, irritated that Sparks had managed to finagle himself into the cabin directly behind Kelly and the girl, wondering what kind of mischief he was up to. “Robertson’s in six, and Tobin and Alvarez are doubled up in number eight.”
“I think we should have doubled everybody up.”
“I’m trying not to scare everybody to death,” Blake said. “Besides, who’d want to sleep with you?”
“You got a point, but I think we ought to at least post a watch,” the chief said.
“The only one I’d trust out there alone tonight would be Sergeant Rivero, and he’s standing watch in the engine room.”
“What good’s the machinery if all our people get murdered in their sleep?”
“They’ll be okay if they stay in their rooms,” Blake said. “But if anything happens to that plant, we’ll never get out of here.”
“We got side arms, we ain’t exactly helpless. You don’t have to be no marine to stand watch.”
“Who would you post? Tobin? Robertson? Alvarez? Doc? Even with a side arm, they wouldn’t be any match for someone lying in wait. If this guy was good enough to pick off almost the entire crew one by one . . .” His voice fell away. “It’s too dangerous to expose our people like that.”
“But what if this headcase . . . how you say his name?”
“Kelly says it’s El Ky-yad-o, means ‘the silent one.”
“So what if El Callado decides to open the seacocks and scuttle the ship while we’re asleep?” the chief said. “We wouldn’t even know it ‘til it was too late.”
“If he was going to do that, he would have done it by now. That’s not what this guy’s about. I get the feeling from talking with Rivero that this joker’s guidance system has somehow malfunctioned, that he’s on some misguided mission to protect the ship and its cargo for who he perceives his real masters to be, this Ramirez cartel. Sinking it’s the last thing he’d want to do.”
“And that missing corpse in the vault. Gives me the creeps.” Kozlewski looked at Blake. “What you think he’s up to?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of theories, but . . . I just don’t know.”
The chief gazed out the porthole into the black night. “I wonder where he is, what he’s thinking, what he’s doing right now?”
“I’d give a year’s pay to know that.”
“What did you learn from the little girl?”
“Not much,” Blake said. “Kelly and I
tried to talk to her, but she got upset every time we brought it up. Poor kid. It’s not hard to see why.”
The chief shook his head. “I’ll be damn glad when we find him. A guy like that running around loose aboard a ship can cause a lot of trouble.”
“We can deal with whatever he does after the fact,” Blake said. “But I’m not going to expose our people trying to prevent it. I’m not going to play the game on his terms. We need every pair of hands we’ve got if we’re going to get under way.”
“Too bad you couldn’t get the girl to talk. Maybe she could tell us something that would help us find him,” the chief said.
“She’s bunking with Kelly. I asked Kelly to talk to her later after she’s calmed down. Maybe she’ll have better luck alone.”
The chief looked out the porthole again and then at Blake, rubbing the side of his nose. “Weather seems to be getting better all the time, Lieutenant. Maybe we should just wait for that Colombian frigate. The wind’s calm now. Maybe that storm’ll go right past us. The exec said it keeps changing direction.”
“We can’t count on that,” Blake said.
“Yeah, I know. But we also can’t count on getting this pile of junk under way without blowing it up in the process,” the chief said. “We’ve got an inexperienced crew here. We need to weigh the risks of doing a cold-start and maybe blowing up one of the boilers. Where’d we be then?”
Blake let out a tired breath. He’d heard Kozlewski’s arguments on the way down from the dining salon. “We’ve got a core of experienced hands,” he said. “You’ve got thirty years’ experience as a boiler tender. Robertson’s a second-class BT. Tobin’s a third-class machinist’s mate. They’re both young, but they’re good men. Sparks is a louse, but he knows what he’s doing. I sailed as a third assistant engineer for a couple of years. I’ve done a couple of cold-starts on merchant ships.”
“Yeah, sitting next to a dock, with auxiliary power lines coming in to back you up. But not out in the middle of the ocean, not in a storm. And sure as hell not on one this old and beat-up.” The chief stroked his chin. “I don’t know. There’s an awful lot that can go wrong. With all those chemicals on board . . . If we had a fire in the engine room, we got no pumps, nothing to fight it with, we could end up blowing this thing sky-high. With no lifeboats, we’d be screwed. I just don’t know if it’s worth the risk.”
“If we wait for the storm to hit, it’ll be too late,” Blake said. “If we’re going to get under way, we’ve got to do it now.”
“I don’t know how you figure we got all this experience, sir. The only real experience we got is you, me, and Sparks. Robertson and Tobin ain’t been around that long.”
“Long enough,” Blake said. “We’re dealing with a basic power plant here. Single screw, turbine-driven through reduction gears. Six thousand shaft horsepower. It’s all vintage stuff, but nothing unusual. Pair of GE turbines, one cross-compound unit, one high- and one low-pressure turbine. Gravity-type lubricating-oil system-”
“Did you get a close look at the turbines?” The chief screwed up his face. “They look like something out of a museum.”
“You don’t have to worry about the turbines,” Blake said. “The older ones were built to last forever. But there’s piping, just in case. We can cut over and run either the high- or the low-pressure turbine as a stand-alone if we have to in a pinch.”
“And those boilers . . . Jesus.”
Blake struggled to keep his voice level. “They’re as good as any marine boilers you’ll find today. Babcock and Wilcox, oil-burning, sectional header, single-pass type. About 500 PSIG.”
“I’d be afraid to go near ‘em with a full head of steam.”
“Damn it, there’s nothing wrong with the boilers,” Blake said. “They’re old, but-” He started to say, They’ll be here when you and I are gone, and stopped himself. “They’ll do what we need them to do.” He flipped back to the front page of the tablet. “I’ve started to sketch out an engine-starting procedure. Little rough yet, but”
“Is that what you were working on in the pilothouse?” The chief asked. “You had this plan the whole time, didn’t you?”
“When the Carlyle and the weather went south at the same time, I knew we had to do something.”
“Well, I think we’re taking a hell of a big risk,” the chief said, looking out into the relative calm of the night, “for you to play captain-”
Blake stiffened. “Is that what you think it’s about?”
“We got no backup, Lieutenant. No place to go. If we shit in our nest, we ain’t got another. I just think it’s damn risky-”
“I agree there’s risk involved in getting under way,” Blake said, “but in my mind, there’s a lot greater risk in doing nothing. Don’t be fooled by this lull in the weather. When you’re anywhere near the vicinity of a tropical cyclone, the weather can change in a heartbeat.”
As if on cue, the ship suddenly pitched up, shuddered and rolled sharply to port. The chief grabbed Blake’s chair and hung on with wide eyes, waiting for the ship to right itself. He let out a deep breath. “Well, you could be right. But even if you are right about the weather, I still don’t think we’ve got enough people to pull this scheme off.”
“If we had one man less, we might not,” Blake said, “but I’ve worked out all the assignments, at least in my head, and I think we can do it.”
“In your head?”
“Sit down. I can show you on paper,” Blake said.
The chief stared at him.
Blake threw him a look that said the discussion was over. “We don’t have a lot of time, Chief. Let’s get started.”
“Yes, sir,” Kozlewski said. He retrieved the other chair, which was lying on its side against the bulkhead, and pulled it up to the small desk. “But I gotta tell you, I don’t know anything about merchant ships. I’m way outta my element here.”
“Cut the crap, Chief. You’ve been a boiler tender for thirty years. You’ve done cold-iron start-ups on everything that floats in the Navy,” Blake said. “Suddenly you’ve never seen the inside of an engine room.” Glancing up at Kozlewski, he saw the fear behind the old man’s eyes and softened. He paused for a moment and said, “What’s the problem?”
Kozlewski rubbed his face in his hand. “Tell you the truth, I’m scared shitless.”
Blake nodded. “So am I.”
“Yeah? Well you sure as hell don’t act like it, pushing to get this thing under way. He can pick us off one at a time down there, slinkin’ around in that engine room. There’s a million places a guy like that could hide, just biding his time waiting for someone to come along to check a gauge or close a valve. You saw what he did to those other poor bastards. I say we stay here, stay together, wait ‘til we get picked up.”
“I wish that were an option,” Blake said, “but it’s not.”
“You think he’ll bother us down there? That many of us, I mean?”
“That depends on how smart he is,” Blake said. “If the weather gets worse, he may be smart enough to figure out that he needs us, that we’re his only hope of keeping this thing afloat.”
“You think a whacko’s smart enough to figure that out?”
“Crazy doesn’t mean stupid,” Blake said. “Some of the most violent sociopaths are cunning as hell.”
“And what do you think he’ll do if the weather stays this way?”
“If the weather stabilizes and he thinks he doesn’t need us, he’ll probably go for us, one by one. All the entries in the log said that’s his style. But in either case, we should be okay together in the engine room. He’s not likely to charge into a group of people armed only with a knife.”
“Well, I guess that’s that,” the chief said with resignation. “What have we got to do?”
“I’ve checked off some preliminary stuff,” Blake said. “The good news is the boilers were laid up wet.” He put a check by the first item.
“Not hard to see why,” the chief said.
Blake nodded. “They were obviously in one big hurry to get off this thing.”
“No bigger hurry than me.”
“That’s two of us,” Blake said. He turned back to the tablet and checked off the next three items on the list. “The DC heater is full of water, the distilled-water tank is full, and there appears to be enough Bunker C fuel oil in the settling tank to get us started.”
“What about the stern tube?” the chief asked.
“I looked at it,” Blake said. “The oil-sealing system appears to be okay. No leaks that I could see.” He checked it off.
“What’s next?”
“We’ll need to sound all the fuel-oil tanks and water tanks,” Blake said, writing down the next item. “After that, we’ll cut off all the emergency power going to the rest of the ship” - he glanced up at the single bulb glowing white in the overhead - “and route it to the engine room and boiler room through the emergency electrical bus. Then we begin the process of lighting off one of the boilers.”
“That might take some doing,” the chief said.
“Same basic procedure as a destroyer. First step is to make sure the bottom and surface blow valves are closed and not leaking.” He wrote it down.
“Better check the steam stop valves,” the chief said.
“Right,” Blake said, writing. “What’s next?”
The chief shrugged. “Unless you want to be adding water to the boiler while you’re raising a head of steam, you’d better make sure the main feed valves are closed.”
“That’s right,” Blake said, writing faster now. “Just like a destroyer.” He glanced at the chief. “What’s next?”
Kozlewski squinted into the corner. “I reckon we’d have to make sure the air cocks on the steam drum and water drum are open.”
Point of Honor Page 17
