by Michael Howe
“Shit!” MacNeal groaned. “You two,” he grated at the two men standing close to him, “slap that pelican hook on the chain and stop it just in case the windlass lets go.” He then noticed the windlass operator lying on the deck and ran over to him. He was alive but he didn’t look good. He looked as if he’d been shot by a cannon filled with scrap. MacNeal knelt next to him then shouted into his walkie-talkie: “One of my men is injured. Get the doctor here quick.”
“I think we’ve got trouble, Boss.”
Chambers, his stomach beginning to churn, turned to find Alex standing behind him.
“Tell Jerry and Ted to get forward and find out what’s happening. You and Ray stand by. I’m going to the bridge.”
Even as Mike spoke, Aurora’s general alarm burst to life. Several moments later, while the crew ran to their emergency stations and automatic watertight doors slammed shut throughout much of the ship, the alarms were muted.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Covington. An explosion of unknown origin has occurred on the ship’s forecastle. I’m not totally certain of the explosion’s extent, but the damage appears to be limited to the area around the anchor windlass. As a precaution I must ask all of you to do the following: Get your personal flotation device and then report to one of the following public areas. Those of you whose last names start with A through J, please report to the main dining room; those of you whose last names begin with K through S, please report to the main lecture hall; and all those whose last names start with T through Z, please report to the main lounge. Try to make yourselves comfortable and please be considerate of the feelings of your fellow passengers. I expect to be able to give you more information by the time you have arrived at one of these gathering places.”
“It happened,” said Covington to Mike as the latter arrived.
“I’m afraid so. Motors explode but not that way. I’m going to establish some security for the passengers.”
“Please do.”
Mike then called Alex and instructed her to collect up Ray and Dave Ellison and each go to one of the gathering places to provide security and maintain order.
“Bridge, this is MacNeal,” squawked Covington’s walkie-talkie.
“Bridge, aye,” replied Covington.
“The windlass is totally destroyed, Captain. I’m going to have to buoy and cut the chain and slip if you want to get under way.”
“That’s what we’re going to have to do. We can’t just sit here and wait for something else to happen. How’s your man?”
“He’s a mess but he’s conscious and seems alert. There’s a lot of blood but . . . Here comes Dr. Savage.”
“Have her call me as soon as she knows something. And you get going on the chain. Advise me as soon as you’re ready to slip the anchor.”
“Roger.
“Sam,” snapped the boatswain to one of his more experienced hands, “you and, ah, Dawson get a sledge and a chisel and get down to the chain locker. Find the next split link,” he continued, referring to the special chain link that was split the long way and used to connect the separate ninety-foot shots of chain, “and split it. And be goddamn careful. Don’t get tangled in the chain, just in case something up here carries away. I don’t want you going through the hawse.”
“Okay, Boats.”
“The anchor windlass?” said Covington to Chambers. “You think this is all of it? Some sort of message?”
Chambers looked at him and shook his head. “What other ships are in the area?”
“Several other cruise ships—one’s an old Russian research vessel—and an Argentine supply ship, but they’re all well to the east of us, dodging drift ice. Anyway, they’re all smaller than we are. One’s not any bigger than a mid-sized trawler.”
“Nothing to the west?”
“An American supply ship returning to New Zealand from McMurdo, but she’s over three thousand miles away and I suspect having more than enough troubles of her own.”
“So we’re on our own until we get to Ushuaia?”
“Once we get partway across the Drake Passage, somebody might be able to reach us from Ushuaia, but I’m not sure what they’ll be able to do. Especially if the weather keeps deteriorating. All the same, I’ll request that any of the larger vessels that might be there get under way to meet us as soon as possible.”
Marcello Cagayan felt the thump then heard the alarms. Phase one of his mission had been executed. He jumped out of his rack and dashed down the corridor. Mumbling a loud “What the fuck!” he joined the stampede and headed for his emergency station at switchboard number one in the electrical Auxiliary Room.
“What the hell’s happening?” he demanded of the electrician in charge.
“Some sort of explosion in the anchor windlass. Roberts—he’s there—thinks it was a bomb.”
“A bomb! Anybody hurt?”
“One deckhand. Roberts doesn’t seem to think it’s caused much damage, though. Except to the windlass.”
“That’s fucking strange.”
“Yeah, that and Mr. Rounding.”
“You think he did the bomb?”
“What else can I think?”
“An explosion, Dad? Like a bomb?”
“I suppose so, Katie. Something like that. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”
“Isn’t there something we should be doing to help?”
“At the moment I think we should leave it to Captain Covington and those navy people, so keep moving. We’re supposed to go to the lecture hall.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. You think they’ll have any food there? I’m starved.”
“Tim,” said Dana, starting to laugh, “you’ve come up with a real adventure for us this time.”
“This is Jen Harris broadcasting live from the long-troubled cruise ship Aurora Australis a few miles from Antarctica.” As she spoke, the reporter and her team stood in the opened door of a cabin, facing a passageway filled with passengers headed toward the Main Dining Room. “For several days now, there has been rising concern that the ship is a target for terrorists. Today, those concerns have proven all too accurate. Not six hours ago, American military personnel, after a long boat chase across the stormy, bitterly cold Bellingshausen Sea, shot and killed a member of the ship’s crew who was suspected of being a terrorist. Then, not fifteen minutes ago, what was almost certainly an explosive device went off on the ship’s foredeck, seriously injuring at least one member of the crew, maybe more. As of right now the passengers have been ordered to assemble in certain safe zones. Although there is little sign of panic yet, everybody is very much on edge.
“Pardon me,” she said, reaching out toward a woman with very wide eyes, “would you mind telling us just how dangerous you believe this situation really is?”
Mike Chambers stood in the pilothouse and rubbed the back of his neck. What a fuckup! Two men inexplicably dead, one seriously injured, one explosive device, six hundred very unhappy passengers and crew, and he was still no closer to the core of the problem than he had been back in Tampa. Should he assume Rounding was a crazy son of a bitch with a grudge who left a device in the windlass as some sort of feeble protest? Had he left more? Or was Rounding not involved at all? Were there other devices? He’d found no evidence of them. Should he encourage Covington to remain anchored here, where shore was only half a mile away? No, that was impossible. It was a lee shore. A deadly mass of ice-cold rock and rock-hard ice. With the weather building the way it was, the ship would be driven onto it by midnight and many would die. The most logical solution he could see was to run for Ushuaia and pray.
“This is Captain Covington. I can now confirm that the explosion in the anchor windlass has done absolutely no significant damage to the ship except making anchoring more complicated. Aurora is as seaworthy now as she was when we left Buenos Aires. It is safe for all of you to return to your normal activities. Please be sure to re-stow your PFDs in your staterooms.”
After replacing the PA m
icrophone, Covington told MacNeal to slip the anchor. With a rumble and a cloud of rust dust the anchor chain flew up out of the chain locker, across the deck and out through the hawse hole. Then, with a splash, Aurora was under way.
“If it ain’t one thing, it’s another,” mumbled Brad to nobody in particular. He tossed down the remains of his fifth orange martini as he sat alone in the Masthead Lounge, at a table intended for six, his oversized gold earring glinting.
James Ives, CEO of Universal Systems and Solutions, heard the remark and stopped, clutching his wife’s arm as he did. He knew who the kid was; he was the singer’s stud. And he could also spot him as a loser. But he was scared now and he had an overwhelming impulse to sound off. “I wouldn’t be so damn blasé about it, kid. There’s a very good chance we’re all going to get blown to hell. I’m going to see the captain right now. The man’s a bumbler. Demand he and those damn navy people do something. Get us the hell off this ship!”
“Damn right,” slurred Brad. “Hasn’t the fucking faintest idea what he’s doing.”
Ives looked down at the kid and realized he didn’t feel any better at all. Finding himself in agreement with this fool was no more satisfying than being in agreement with his simpleminded wife.
As Brad watched the unknown-to-him puffed shirt walk by, he thought about Chrissie, the bitch! She wouldn’t let him go with her to the Main Dining Room, where the Cs were supposed to go, and she wouldn’t come here, where the Ws like him were supposed to gather. He’d had it with her. Absolutely had it!
“Yes, Alan,” said Mike into the satellite phone, “Jerry’s convinced it was a bomb and not just the winch motor exploding.”
“Do you appreciate just how difficult it is for SECDEF to see these things on TV before I can give them a heads-up?”
“Alan, there’s nothing I can do about the media. They’re crawling all over the ship so they see things happening. And there’s no way I can arrest them.”
“Lean on the ship’s captain to do it.”
“He won’t. We’ve discussed the problem. They’re not the ones threatening his ship.”
“How many casualties were there really?”
“One, a deckhand, and he’ll probably be okay. Most of the blast was directed upward . . . and both the senator and the congressman are fine. That’s the odd part about this whole damn thing: I get the impression it wasn’t planned to necessarily injure anybody. That it was just a show. Hasn’t somebody claimed credit?”
“No, not yet. At least you got the guy who planted it.”
“Rounding? I’m still doubting he did it.”
“Of course he did. That, Mike, is the official word!”
Chambers didn’t answer.
“What’s your plan now?”
“Same as before. Keep searching until we reach Ushuaia and get rid of the passengers. Then, with luck, we can turn the mess over to the Argentines. Let their bomb squad share some of the glory.”
“First solid thinking you’ve come up with. We get credit for killing the terrorist and getting the ship back to port in one piece.”
Mike hung up and looked around at the team, which was assembled in the suite.
“You think there’s another aboard?” asked Jerry.
“We have to assume that, Chief, and we’ve got to find it—or them—and also whoever controls them.”
“You don’t think it was Rounding?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t swear there weren’t a few scraps of timer in that mess,” said Jerry. “I’ve secured what I could, but the lab’s going to have to go through it all.”
“Let’s hope you’re right and that if it was Rounding he didn’t leave any others aboard.”
“What about the life capsules?” asked Ray, his face drawn and his swollen and tightly bandaged ankle up on a table, precisely were the doctor had told him not to put it.
“Launching boats in this sort of weather will be a nightmare,” replied Jerry.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Mike.
“We’ll still be hunting for a needle in a haystack, Boss,” contributed Alex, who looked only marginally better than Fuentes.
“Thanks for reminding me.”
As soon as he was released from his emergency station, Cagayan returned to the crew’s lounge, along with a number of others. Suddenly nobody seemed interested in sleep.
Because he was a nobody, nobody paid much attention to the small Filipino. He was free to look and listen, and what he saw delighted him. His shipmates were scared. All they seemed able to talk about were bombs and fires and how the bombs would be in their work space and if the ship sank most of them would die.
The passengers were even more entertaining. He was in no position to mingle with them, but the media crews did it for him. All he had to do was look at the TV to see the fear, and the resulting anger, in the eyes and words of the somebodies who were being interviewed. Despite their own fear, Jen and the other interviewers fanned that fear through their carefully posed, hopelessly leading questions. “How do you think the captain is doing?” “What about the U.S. Navy?” “Were sufficient precautions taken in the past?” “What should be done now?” “Do you think the engineer was the only terrorist?”
And it was he, Marcello Cagayan, the “mono,” who controlled it all!
15
The Drake Passage
“Boss,” said Alex into the walkie-talkie a little more than an hour after the ship had gotten under way, “Alan wants to talk to you again. He says it’s urgent.”
“Roger, I’m on my way” replied Mike, who was in the galley, supervising the search among all the cooking gear. “Continue searching,” he said to the food service manager as he clipped the walkie-talkie to his belt. “Keep looking for anything that doesn’t belong, anything that nobody can identify. If you spot anything, keep away from it! Call me or Ms. Mahan in the captain’s conference room. As soon as you finish here, go on to the pantry and then the storerooms.” As he gave the instructions, he hoped that Alan wasn’t calling to continue micromanaging the operation. He simply didn’t have time for that.
“What’s up, Alan?” said Mike five minutes later, after grabbing the phone from Alex’s extended hand.
“I wish to fuck I knew. Somebody, using what appears to be a totally untraceable e-mail, has claimed credit for your current mess . . . and threatened even worse.”
“Read it to me, if it’s not classified.”
“Classified! It was sent to Reuters! I’m willing to bet the media morons you have with you already know what it says.”
“So what does it say?”
“I quote: ‘Aurora Australis and all aboard her are doomed. Free the Faithful to Dream. Free the Faithful to Believe. Allah Akbar.’ ”
“Who took credit?”
“The Brotherhood of Faith.”
“The Brotherhood of Faith? Who the hell are they?”
“Nobody here has the slightest idea.”
“Alex?” asked Mike, half covering the mouthpiece.
“Never heard of them.”
“At least they did us one favor,” observed Alan.
“You mean telling us there’s another bomb? I’m not sure how much good that’s going to do.”
“Well you’re going to have to do something, Old Buddy. You’ve got what, about a thousand people aboard? Do you have a plan?”
“Six hundred, Alan, don’t get carried away. At the moment we’re headed northwest in the middle of what everybody would describe as a major hurricane if it weren’t so far south. We’re almost two thousand miles from anybody who might help us.”
“That’s not the Titanic, is it? You’ve got lifeboats.”
“Yes, Alan, and I’d say they’re first rate . . . But if we had to abandon ship right now, in the middle of this meteorological nightmare, at least half the passengers and crew would end up dead. There are limits, you know.”
“Limits or not, I’ve got to tell our mutual b
oss something so he can tell the president what to say to the media. Nothing much else has happened the past few days, so they’re in a feeding frenzy about this.”
“Same as before. We’re going to continue searching the ship and talking with people who seem a little sketchy. And Alex is going to keep digging, to see if she can come up with anything your people have missed.”
“That’s not going to go over very well!”
“What the hell else do you suggest!”
“You’re the on-scene commander, but The Man isn’t going to be happy to hear that’s all you can come up with. Americans expect more dynamic and imaginative solutions from people in your position.”
“Such as?”
“More of a kick-ass, boots-in-their-faces approach.”
“On whom?”
“That’s up to you to decide. Lean on the sons of bitches. Especially the foreigners. This is war, god damn it! Do what the American people pay you to do.”
“Good night, Alan. Sleep tight. I think I’m about to be seasick.”
He then called Covington to give him the good news—hoping to beat the media to the punch.
Even before Arthur Covington had slipped Aurora’s anchor and turned to the northwest, the weather had been deteriorating, and it continued to do so with increasing rapidity, causing Covington to reduce speed twice. With the stabilizers still out of commission, the huge waves were totally free to toss the ship around to their hearts’ content, forcing her to buck and plunge and roll and groan—and to cause a number of passengers to do the same.
Having awarded himself another break, Mike appeared on the bridge. The scene that met him was hellish, although his view was limited by the surrounding darkness. The wind was screaming, driving a gravel-like snow before it, and waves almost as high as the bridge were rising out of the depths and breaking over the bow as the ship drove into them.
