“Pretty much. One of the attendants saw him ditch the canoe and take off toward the GWU Metrorail stop. The description matches.”
Latham stared into space. He was numb. They’d worked so hard….
“Charlie, are you there? Should we—”
“No,” Latham said. “Forget it. He’s gone.”
32
The tide was already beginning to lift the stern, banging it against the cliff face and breaking free chunks of ice that shattered on the deck. Tanner looked aft and saw waves lapping at the midships rail. Soon the entire afterdeck would be submerged.
Bear tied off the rope, set himself, and lowered Briggs over the side until he was perched against the hull. Below his feet, waves rushed through the hole with an explosive sucking sound. The billowing mist froze almost immediately into clouds of vapor. Tanner peered into the hole but could see nothing of the interior.
“Ready, Bear?” he called.
“Ready!”
Briggs watched the waves surge, timing them. One one thousand, two one thousand… He eyed the hole’s ragged edges; if he timed it wrong, he’d be gutted like a fish.
Tanner pushed off the hull, swinging out and down. Jagged metal flashed past. He plunged into the water and he felt like he’d been hit with an electric current. Then he was up again, gasping for breath. A wave broke through the hole and blotted out the sky. His ears squealed with the pressure change.
He looked around. He was submerged up to his waist; already he could feel his legs growing numb. Above him was a horizontal steel railing. He grabbed it, pulled himself up, and rolled himself onto the catwalk.
He was in the anchor windlass room, a small compartment containing the winch that raised and lowered the anchor. A few feet away, a ladder ascended into the darkness.
“Briggs,” Cahil called. “Hey, Briggs—”
“I’m okay, Bear,” Tanner shouted. He untied himself and tossed the rope through the hole. “There’s a catwalk a few feet inside the hull. Once you get through, reach out. I’ll grab you.”
With a banzai cry and a splash, Cahil swung through the hole. Tanner caught his hand and pulled him onto the catwalk. “Welcome aboard,” Tanner said.
“God, that’s cold.”
“I noticed.” Briggs shined his flashlight over the blackened edges of the hole. “Shaped charge,” he said. “They tried to scuttle her.”
“Just one’s not enough to sink her,” Bear said. “There’s gotta be others.”
“Yep. Let’s get moving.”
They climbed the udder to the next deck. The tide had not yet reached this high, but they could hear it below them, sloshing and echoing. They headed aft, passing several machinery rooms and the galley, all of which were deserted. In a crew’s lounge they found a magazine lying open on a couch; a paperback novel spine-up on a coffee table; a mug, half full of tea. There were no signs of disorder. It was as though the crew had just walked away.
Cahil picked up the magazine; it was written in Kanji.
In the crew’s quarters they found several lockers containing clothes. “Here,” Tanner called to Cahil, tossing him a towel. They both stripped, toweled off until the color returned to their arms and legs, then found a couple pair of coveralls that fit.
“This feels creepy,” said Cahil, slipping into one.
Tanner nodded. “Like borrowing clothes from ghosts.”
They made their way to the pilothouse. The windows were rimmed with ice, and rainbowed sunlight danced on the bulkheads. Like the crew’s quarters, the bridge was a picture of orderliness. Tanner found the helm controls set at All Stop.
They made a quick search. “No logs, records… nothing,” Briggs said.
“Same with charts. Everything’s gone.”
Under their feet, the deck groaned and leaned farther to starboard.
They descended two decks but were stopped by rising water at the entrance to a machinery room. The hatch was open, however, and Tanner shimmied down the railing and shined his flashlight inside.
“There’s another hole,” he called. “About the same size as the one at the bow. It’s filling up quick.”
“Just time for one more stop, then,” Bear said.
In the engine room, the sea had flooded all but the upper-most catwalk on which they stood, and Tanner could hear gurgling whooshes as air pockets were forced ever upward by the tide. They trotted through the next hatch and down a ladder.
The after cargo hold. Water lapped at the edges of the catwalk beneath their feet and up the bulkhead, leaving an ever-thickening sheet of ice. Tanner could feel the chill on him.
“Briggs, you better get over here.”
Tanner walked to where Cahil was kneeling.
The bodies were lying face up and side by side against the port bulkhead. All but one of them were chained to the railing, and all were submerged up to their chests, their faces crusted with ice. Several of the corpses’ wrists were rubbed raw, some clear to the bone. Tanner tried to picture it: chained here as the scuttling charges exploded… flailing in the rising water, screaming for help, but no one coming.
What a god-awful way to die.
The only body not chained had met a different fate than had the others. Aside from being the only non-Oriental, this man, a Caucasian with thinning blond hair, had been shot once in the forehead.
One by one, Tanner shined his flashlight over each face. At the fourth face, he stopped. “Bear, recognize him?”
“Yeah.”
It was the missing engineer from the Takagi Shipyard.
Cahil took some quick photos, then followed Tanner down the catwalk to where it widened into a small alcove. Here, beneath the catwalk, they found an undetonated scuttling charge attached to the port bulkhead.
“Sealed bowl charge,” Cahil said. “Half pound of RDX, looks like. See the funnel at the bottom of the bowl?”
“That’s not good,” Briggs whispered.
The charge was armed with a hydrostatic trigger, essentially a funnel at the bottom of which sat a detonator designed to fire when water poured in and caused a short circuit.
Tanner looked down. Water was lapping at the catwalk.
“We’re out of time, Bear.”
They were climbing the ladder when the deck lurched under their feet, then leaned sharply to starboard. The ship started wallowing. Instinctively, Tanner knew what was happening: the tide had floated the ship’s stern. They had only minutes before the bow followed.
“Go, Bear. Run!”
Chasing the beams of their flashlights, they charged up the ladder, through the engine room, and out the opposite hatch.
They heard a groan of steel. The deck rolled beneath their feet. They crashed against the bulkhead. Cahil’s flashlight clattered to the deck and rolled away, the beam casting jumbled shadows against the bulkheads. They stood up, braced themselves, kept moving. The list was passing fifty degrees now.
“Ever see The Poseidon Adventure?” Cahil called.
“As a kid. It scared the hell out of me.”
“Me, too. I think we lost our exit, bud.” The hole in the bow was now either submerged or buried in silt.
“Let’s go for the one in the MR,” Tanner said.
It took them sixty seconds to reach the ladder to the machinery room. They shimmied down the rail and slipped into the icy water. Water was boiling through the hatch. Too fast, Briggs thought. As the ship was rolling over, the trapped water was cascading from port to starboard, gaining speed like a self-contained tidal wave.