The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  Hardin looked back and saw a tremendous comber traveling rapidly from the southwest. Its crest began to crumble, spilling tons of white water ahead of it, catching up with them at a frightening speed.

  Gripping the wheel with both hands, he tried to hold her into the wind to take the roller from behind. The crest loomed high, threatening to curl over and drop on the Swan, but she rose with it, climbing, struggling up and up, and finally reached the crest, where she wallowed like a wood chip in the rushing foam, high above the raging sea. Miles away, mountainous waves serrated the horizons.

  Hardin stared.

  A massive black shape rammed through the swirling chaos.

  LEVIATHAN.

  Bow on and close.

  17

  Black against the sky, crowned in white spray, the oil tanker shattered the towering seas, goring the combers, straddling the troughs, driving implacably through the storm that mauled the sailboat in its path. Livid smoke stood above the unmistakable silhouette of its twin funnels. The wide bow climbed heavily out of the water, poised at a steep angle, then dropped like a trip hammer.

  A thunderous report echoed across the turmoil.

  The Swan plummeted down the backside of the roller, deep into a boiling trough, and Hardin lost sight of LEVIATHAN. He steered frantically through chaotic cross seas, heading for the next roller.

  Ajaratu leaped onto the deck behind him and, gripping the backstay, shouted directions from her high perch. He steered as she said to and the Swan was suddenly climbing as if in the slings in a boatyard. Then she was atop the roller, surfing on the thick, white crest. Hardin steered to keep her up and tried to estimate the distance to LEVIATHAN.

  Machinelike absorption possessed him, focusing his senses on the black ship. The sounds of the sea faded. He was dimly aware of Ajaratu crouching beside him, ready to take the wheel. His eyes felt like binoculars, clear and steady.

  It was as if he had a range finder in his brain. He knew as surely as tossing a ball where he would fire his rocket. In four seconds the Swan would slip from its perch. Three hundred yards to port a gigantic breaking roller was plowing across the sea. LEVIATHAN was two rollers beyond it, but the ship would cross those two in the time it took Hardin to reach the first. He looked for a path through the turbulent trough—a path to his shot. He had sailed six thousand miles to be there for five seconds.

  The Swan teetered off the crest. No longer able to see LEVIATHAN, Hardin steered downwind as the roller rushed past, then close-hauled across the trough, dodging the spiky seas that leaped around the Swan like the walls of a living maze. He heard thunder when LEVIATHAN bombarded its first roller, and knew that the Swan was crossing too slowly because he wasn’t yet halfway across. Risking a narrow passage between two waves about to collide, he steered farther off the wind. The Swan accelerated, but a sea buried the bow and for a second white-green water mounted the foredeck. He feared she wouldn’t come up, but she flung the water off like a dirty blanket.

  When the growl of the roller grew to a roar and it was looming overhead, Hardin showed Ajaratu a route up the writhing slope.

  “Stay on top as long as you can.”

  She took the wheel without a word, and her eyes, large in her drawn face, locked on the roller. Hardin unlashed the Dragon, knelt beneath the weapon, and let the barrel nestle onto his shoulder.

  He removed the lens caps, quartered the sea in the crosshairs, set the range finder for three hundred yards, and blended his body with the weapon. The roller drew near. The Swan began lifting. He swung the muzzle until he was aiming ahead over the port side, and made certain that the fiery exhaust wouldn’t jet back at Ajaratu.

  The bow sloped sharply. They were halfway up the roller, lifting fast, racing to get to the top before it fell on them. The Swan started to yaw as the water grew violent. The roller’s surface was disintegrating, turning to chaos. Ajaratu worked the wheel with one hand and her knee. The boat straightened, still rising.

  Hardin heard the thunder of LEVIATHAN hitting its second crest. Then the Swan surged to the top of the roller and the sea spread before them and LEVIATHAN filled the sights.

  Its massive bow climbed ponderously toward the sky. Hardin fixed the bulbous prow in the cross hairs. He reached for the trigger switch, aiming for the waterline. The setup was perfect. The monster was rearing, baring the whole of its prognathous bow.

  Ajaratu screamed a warning.

  The black in Hardin’s sights turned milky gray. A craggy second crest toppled over the first, piled tons of seawater on the Swan, and smashed him to the deck. The Dragon spun wildly and the muzzle raked his temple as he fell under the icy water.

  Somersaulting about the cockpit, he crashed into the boom, the wheel, the winches. Pain stabbed his face. Something sharp gouged his kidneys. Ajaratu catapulted into him. He closed his arms around her and held on with all his strength. Suddenly his lifeline wrenched his chest and he felt himself being dragged through the water.

  His lungs burning, he held Ajaratu with one arm and tried to swim to the surface. His lifeline held him. Panic welled into his mouth. The Swan was sinking, dragging him with her. He clawed at his parka for his knife. The zippered pocket wouldn’t open. His fingers were numb. Then his face was out of the water. He took a mouthful of brine, gagged it out, and pulled Ajaratu back when a wave plucked her away.

  The Swan was slamming up and down in short fierce waves, smacking the water, threatening to smash their skulls. Hardin tugged Ajaratu’s lifeline to make sure it was still attached.

  “You okay?” he shouted.

  She nodded, her teeth chattering. The water was much colder than the air.

  “I’ll go first.”

  He pushed away from her, kicked toward the Swan, gauged the rise and fall of the pounding hull, gripped the toe rail when she was at her lowest, and dragged himself under the lifelines. The jib was snapping like a machine gun. He reached over the side and hauled in on Ajaratu’s safety line. When the boat lurched toward her, she slithered snakelike under the lines, despite her bound arm, and clambered into the cockpit, where she collapsed on her back and lay gasping, her face painfully contorted.

  The boat was in a trough. The big sea that had broached them had vanished to the east, and the next giant roller was roaring toward them. The sheets were trailing in the water. The wheel spun in crazy circles as the wet sail flapped and the boat wallowed helplessly, bereft of way. Snagged by its sights, the Dragon dangled from the sling, banging its muzzle on the deck.

  Hardin hesitated, torn between saving the weapon and manning the wheel. The sea won. The weapon was useless without the boat. He stopped the wheel with the friction brake, then put it hard over and waited for eons for the sloop to put her stern to the seas. The jib, partially tangled, banged full with a maverick gust. The bow responded, the Swan took way, and the stern slowly wheeled toward the threatening roller.

  He locked the wheel, leaped over Ajaratu, and tried to lift the Dragon back into the sling. Lashing the front of the cockpit, splintering the teak cross seat, it was too heavy, too wet and slippery and unwieldy to control. He reached to lower it with the block and tackle.

  Ajaratu cringed, her eyes round with terror, and he thought, fleetingly, that he had never seen her scared before. He looked up. The sky was black with LEVIATHAN.

  The oil tanker lumbered atop the crest like Hardin’s nightmares, looming over the Swan; the wave’s upward flow was lifting her to LEVIATHAN even as the ship was flattening the crest and descending upon the sailboat.

  And, as in a nightmare, Hardin couldn’t aim his weapon. The broaching sea had hopelessly tangled the block and tackle. He struggled furiously, heaving the muzzle up at the passing hull by brute force, his whole will concentrated on firing.

  Blood thundered in his ears, blotting out the roar of LEVIATHAN’s passage through the storm. He saw red. A quiet, cool voice deep in his mind told him he couldn’t sink LEVIATHAN with this shot. He wouldn’t listen. He burned to inflict damage, to maul a
nd maim, to rip a hole in the monster, to punish.

  “No!” screamed Ajaratu.

  “It’s mine,” yelled Hardin.

  “No,” she screamed again. “You’ll kill us!”

  She gestured frantically at the back of the rocket launcher. The exhaust was jammed against the cockpit coaming. Were he to fire, it would explode in his hands.

  Hardin nestled his face to the sights. It didn’t matter. The rocket would launch regardless, and at such short range he didn’t have to be alive to guide it. The wall of the ship was yards away; he could see the hull welds. He fumbled for the trigger switch. Movement intruded on his field of vision. Motion different from the passage of the hull atop the crest, or the leaping water, or the heavings of the Swan. Ajaratu was coming at him, swinging a ten-inch bronze winch handle.

  There was time to fire before she hit him, but the look on her face brought him back to sanity. He scrambled aside. The winch handle grazed his ear. Hardin seized her wrist.

  “Okay, I’m fine. Let’s get out of here.” He released her and pushed her toward the helm.

  Ajaratu stared at the winch handle, then up at the hull rushing past.

  “Move!” he roared. “Right rudder. It’ll crush us.”

  LEVIATHAN and the Swan were still on parallel courses, heading oppositely. The wave was still drawing the Swan up while the ship was still settling down. Hardin could see its bottom plates.

  He planted his feet and stood ready to try to fend off, but as LEVIATHAN descended upon them he wondered if it might be more sensible to haul the inflatable life raft from under the cockpit seat than to try to soften the collision. He waited, transfixed, with the boat hook in his hands, too battered by fear and shock and too exhausted to make a new decision.

  Exactly as it had when it had run down Siren, LEVIATHAN had stolen the wind from the Swan. The jib swayed uselessly, and the rudder seemed to have no effect. The Swan refused to budge more than twenty feet from the tanker.

  “Play the wheel,” Hardin shouted, but Ajaratu stood still, her eyes closed, her head bowed.

  “Stop praying and steer!” he bellowed.

  A quarter wave detached from the great Cape roller supporting LEVIATHAN and forged ahead, growing rapidly larger. Ajaratu steered the Swan’s stern over it and it swept the sloop away from the main roller. It disintegrated in seconds, spilling the Swan deep into a trough a hundred yards from LEVIATHAN.

  The oil tanker steamed past, its square stern curling an enormous wake out of the sea like a giant plane gouging a thick pungent wood shaving from a soft board. The wake united with the shattered roller, and the combination raced after the Swan like a falling building.

  “Inside!” Hardin yelled. He locked the steering wheel and dragged Ajaratu around the swaying rocket launcher to the companionway. Shooting glances over his shoulder at the perpendicular sixty-foot wave, he fumbled the hatch cover open. Ajaratu scrambled below. The wave thundered closer. He dove after her and slammed the hatch shut.

  “Grab ahold.”

  He clambered into his bunk—the smallest, most protected space in the cabin—and pulled Ajaratu in with him. The monster reared. The cabin darkened in its shadow. The Swan fought to attain the crest, but the wave was too steep and too chaotic—multifaceted— to provide a slope to climb. Her bow pointed the ocean floor. The wave curled over the Swan and for a long, dark moment the boat sailed in a cave of water. Then the crest collapsed. And the Swan tumbled onto its bow, end over end, until her mast pointed down and her keel to the sky.

  18

  A steel toolbox caromed through the main salon, splintered the fore cabin door, and hurtled the length of the boat back to the stern cabin. Hardin and Ajaratu slammed into the berth’s ceiling.

  Appendant to the crashing, banging din of objects falling and breaking and the thunder of the rampant wave, a grinding, wrenching sound shook the Swan—the diesel engine shifting on its bed. Hardin held his breath, waiting for it to shear its bolts and plummet through the roof.

  Water-dimmed light shone through the upside-down windows and hatch covers. She righted suddenly, dragged around by her seven-thousand-pound keel. They sprawled from the berth space and everything that had fallen to the ceiling cascaded about them. Their heavy foul-weather gear protected them from the broken glass, but Hardin cut his hand as he tried to stand.

  She flipped again, end over end, and landed upside down. The Dragon smashed the Lucite hatch cover and a torrent of icy water gushed in.

  The water surged over the broken crockery, rattling like surf on a pebble beach. Hardin and Ajaratu floundered ankle deep on the ceiling of the wrecked salon waiting for the keel to right the boat again. But the new weight of the water ballasted the upside-down hull, steadied it in the heaving backwash of the giant wave, and stiffened its resistance to the keel. The light dimmed and the water tugged at their knees.

  “We’re sinking,” said Ajaratu, her voice calm. Her free hand bit fearfully into Hardin’s arm.

  “She’ll turn over,” he said, his mind screaming for the next roller. It was their one chance of turning upright, but where was it? It seemed like minutes since the boat had pitchpoled. Then, with sudden horror, he remembered the way LEVIATHAN had flattened the ocean after it had run down Siren. How long before a roller disturbed the wake and nudged the Swan?

  “Peter?”

  “I’m here.” He drew her close to comfort her. It was nearly dark.

  “I love you.”

  The cabin grew quiet but for the echoing lap of the rising water sloshing from bulkhead to bulkhead. The Swan began to descend quickly.

  “Peter? Tell me you love me.”

  The boat sank lower, but the water in the cabin did not rise correspondingly. They were dropping into a trough.

  “Lie to me! Please. Tell me you love me.”

  “A wave,” Hardin cried. “Hang on, she’s going to throw us.”

  The boat climbed abruptly, heeled onto her side, and lurched upright. A torrent thundered in the broken hatch cover. Hardin lost his grip on Ajaratu and pitched headlong into the waist-deep water. Pummeled by floating floorboards, he surfed across the cabin and regained his feet under the spewing hatch. Then the Swan floated sluggishly out of the giant sea. Light flooded the cabin and the torrent stopped. Something slammed hard against the hull.

  “Ajaratu!”

  “I’m here.”

  She half walked, half swam out of the forecabin. Hardin had already taken his cable cutters from his parka. He started up the companionway shouting orders and dodging the Dragon, which hung through the shattered hatch, swinging wildly as the boat rolled with sharp, abrupt motions.

  “Get me a jib and hammer and nails. And get pots and buckets.”

  Ajaratu struggled back toward the fore cabin, heading for the sail bins. The thing pounding the hull banged again with a brutal jolt.

  “No,” Hardin shouted. “Tools first!”

  He climbed fearfully onto deck, the panic of his voice ringing in his ears.

  The damage was total. The seas had swept the Swan’s decks clean, leveling her mast, tearing away her helm, ventilators, bow pulpit, and lifelines, their stanchions and most of the toe rail they were welded to. Her boom lay across the coach roof, ripped from the mast, but pinioned to the boat by the antitank rocket in the cabin.

  Like a whirlwind which can drive a straw into an oak, the sea had been capricious. Incredibly, it had plucked a deeply seated genoa halyard winch from the coach roof, while a foot away the spinnaker pole still rested securely in its fastenings.

  The mid and fore hatches had held, which was why they were still afloat. The after stay and the port shroud had parted, but the forestay and the starboard shroud hung tautly over the side, and as the sea rolled her, the jagged foot of the aluminum mast reared out of the water and shook the Swan with a blow to her bow.

  Hardin raced forward on the pitching deck, crouched near the stump where the mast had twisted apart, and severed the starboard shroud with the cable cut
ters. He went for the forestay, but as he knelt, he looked back, alerted by a deep rumble. Another Cape roller was after the wallowing Swan; he had no safety line. But if she was thrown against the mast again, it would hole her.

  He worked desperately to cut the forestay, leaning over the bow to reach beyond the heavy chain-plate fittings which were too thick for the cable cutters. The stay parted with a bang. Then the halyards and sheets fetched up tightly between the mast stump and the sinking aluminum shaft.

  The Swan began to lift with the roller—heavy and reluctant. He cut the main halyard, the genoa halyards, the spinnaker halyards, the spinnaker pole lifts, and the flag halyard. He looked for the topping lift, but it had already parted. A single line hung over the side abreast the cockpit. The jib sheet. He stumbled aft, and cut it.

  The mast was gone, but the roller was upon them. He leaped down the companionway, yelled to Ajaratu to hold on, spied the dining-table top floating in the waist-deep water, wedged it into the hatch, and standing on the engine box, tried to brace it with his back. The Dragon shoved at his legs as the boat pitched.

  The roller curled over the Swan and buried her. Hardin held fast for several seconds. Then the pressure of the water was too much and it flung him aside and poured in. When the wave had passed, the Swan was much lower in the water. Ajaratu grabbed Hardin’s parka and hauled him upright.

  “Your toolbox is in the sink. The jib is on the stove. What should I do?”

  “Bail. Throw the water into the cockpit. I’ll help you as soon as I cover the hatch.” Stuffing his pockets with hammer and nails, Hardin folded the jib into a triple square, dragged it up on deck, and spread it over the gaping hatch. Covering the entire area from port to starboard including two holes where the ventilators had been, he lay flat over the Dacron to keep the shrieking wind from blowing it away. Then he nailed it to the teak decks. First the corners, then edges, driving nail after nail, stopping only when a comber drove him below, then resuming work on the patch. Water spouted fitfully from the small space where the washboard had been as Ajaratu bailed into the cockpit, which drained back to the sea.