Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

“You read, Bruce?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Hang on. I’m releasing the switch.”

He pulled the red lever.

A woman’s voice sounded from a speaker mounted overhead. “Lifeboat number one launching in fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. Nine, eight . . .”

The voice echoed in the metal-walled half deck. The countdown ran out; there was a loud clunk as the steel arrestors disengaged. The boat slid forward on the greased rails, nosed off the end into open space, and Liu leaned over the side to watch it fall, as gracefully as a diver, toward the churning sea.

It struck with a tremendous eruption of spray, much larger than anything Liu had seen during the drills: a geyser that rose forty, fifty feet, swept backward in ragged petals by the tearing wind. The VHF channel let loose a squeal of static.

But instead of plunging straight into the water and disappearing, the lifeboat’s forward motion, combined with the added speed of the ship, pitchpoled it sideways, like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond, and it struck the ocean a second time full force along its length, with another eruption of spray that buried the orange boat in boiling water. And then it began to resurface, sluggishly, the Day-Glo hull brightening as it shed green water. The static on the VHF abruptly died into silence.

The woman—Emily Dahlberg—caught her breath, averted her eyes.

Liu stared at the lifeboat, which was already rapidly falling astern. He seemed to be seeing the boat from a strange angle. But no, that wasn’t it: the lifeboat’s profile had changed—the hull was misshapen. Orange and white flecks were detaching themselves from the hull, and a rush of air along a seam blew a line of spray toward the sky.

With a sick feeling Liu realized the hull had been breached, split lengthwise like a rotten melon, and was now spilling its guts.

“Jesus . . .” he heard Crowley murmur next to him. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

He stared in horror at the stoved-in lifeboat. It wasn’t righting itself; it was wallowing sideways, subsiding back in the water, the engine screw uselessly churning the surface, leaving a trail of oil and debris as it fell astern and began to fade away in the gray, storm-tossed seas.

Liu grabbed the VHF and pressed the transmit button. “Bruce! Welch! This is Liu! Respond!

Bruce!”

But there was no answer—as Liu knew there wouldn’t be.

67

ON THE AUXILIARY BRIDGE, LESEUR WAS FACING A TORRENT OF questions.

“The lifeboats!” an officer cried over the others. “What’s happening with the lifeboats?”

LeSeur shook his head. “No word yet. I’m still waiting to hear from Liu and Crowley.”

The chief radio officer spoke up. “I’ve got the

Grenfell

on channel 69.”

LeSeur looked at him. “Fax him on the SSB fax to switch to channel . . . 79.” Maybe choosing an obscure VHF channel to communicate with the Grenfell —channel 79, normally reserved for exchanges between pleasure boats on the Great Lakes—would keep their conversations secret from Mason. He hoped to God she wouldn’t be scanning the VHF channels as a matter of course. She’d already seen, of course, the radar profile of the Grenfell as the ship approached and heard all the chatter on emergency channel 16.

“What’s the rendezvous estimate?” he asked the radio officer.

“Nine minutes.” He paused. “I’ve got the captain of the

Grenfell

on 79, sir.”

LeSeur walked up to the VHF console, slipped on a pair of headphones. He spoke in a low voice. “

Grenfell

, this is First Officer LeSeur, acting commander of the

Britannia

. Do you have a plan?”

“This is a tough one,

Britannia,

but we’ve got a couple of ideas.”

“We’ve got one chance to do this. We’re faster than you by at least ten knots, and once we’re past, that’s it.”

“Understood. We’ve got on board a BO-105 utility chopper, which we could use to bring you some shaped explosives we normally use for hull-breaching—”

“At our speed, in this sea and gale conditions, you’ll never land it.”

A silence. “We’re hoping for a window.”

“Unlikely, but have the bird stand by just in case. Next idea?”

“We were thinking that, on our pass, we could hook the

Britannia

with our towing winch and try to pull her off course.”

“What kind of winch?”

“A seventy-ton electrohydraulic towing winch with a 40mm wire rope—”

“That would snap like a string.”

“It probably would. Another option would be to drop a buoy and tow the wire across your course, hoping to foul your propellers.”

“There’s no way a 40mm wire rope could stop four 21.5-megawatt screws. Don’t you carry fast rescue craft?”

“Unfortunately, there’s no way we can launch our two fast rescue craft in these seas. And in any case there’s no way we can come alongside to board or evacuate, because we can’t keep up with you.”

“Any other ideas?”

A pause. “That’s all we’ve been able to come up with.”

“Then we’ll have to go with my plan,” LeSeur said.

“Shoot.”

“You’re an icebreaker, am I right?” “Well, the Grenfell ’s an ice-strengthened ship, but she’s not a true icebreaker. We sometimes do icebreaking duties such as harbor breakouts.”

“Good enough.

Grenfell

, I want you to chart a course that will take you across our bow—in such a way as to shear it off.”

A silence, and then the reply came. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I read you,

Britannia

.”

“You read me fine. The idea is, by opening selected bulkhead hatches we can flood forward compartments one, two, and three. That will put us down by the head enough to lift our screws almost out of the water. The Britannia will be DIW.”

“You’re asking me to

ram

you? Good God, have you lost your mind? There’s a good chance I’d sink my own vessel!”

“It’s the only way. If you approach head-on just a few points off our starboard side, moving not too fast—say, five to eight knots—then, just before contact, back one screw hard while engaging your bow thrusters, you could shear off our bows with your reinforced forward hullplates, swing free, and we would pass clear of each other on the starboard side. It’d be close, but it would work. That is, if you’ve got the helmsmanship to pull it off.”

“I’ve got to check with Command.”

“We’ve got five minutes to our CPA rendezvous,

Grenfell

. You known damn well you’re not going to get clearance in time. Look, do you have the knackers to do this or not? That’s the real question.”

A long silence.

“All right,

Britannia

. We’ll give it a try.”

68

CONSTANCE’S EYES FLEW OPEN, HER WHOLE BODY JERKING ITSELF awake with a muffled cry. The universe came rushing back—the ship, the rolling room, the splatter of the rain, the booming seas and moaning of the wind.

She stared at the

dgongs

. It lay in an untidy coil around an ancient scrap of crumpled silk. It had been untied—for real.

She looked at Pendergast, aghast. Even as she stared, his head rose slightly and his eyes came back to life, silvery irises glittering in the candlelight. A strange smile spread across his face. “You broke the meditation, Constance.”

“You were trying . . . to

drag

me into the fire,” she gasped.

“Naturally.”

She felt a wash of despair. Instead of pulling him out of darkness, she had almost been pulled in herself. “I was trying to free you from your earthly fetters,” he said.