The first officer gave a curt nod, then, grabbing his own life jacket from a compartment under the navigation table, ducked his head and moved to the hatch leading to the aft deck.
Goos looked back and forth from the open hatch to the captain. “I will go with him,” he said, waiting for permission.
The captain nodded, picking up the radio phone.
“Goos!” he said as the young Balinese steward started down the stairs to the aft passageway. The boy turned, only his head above the deck. “A white flame means a metal fire. Make certain to use the dry Class D extinguishers only. Water will make it worse. And put on a life vest!”
The boy scrambled back up the stairs to retrieve a life jacket from the locker below the console.
A tremendous roar filled the night air. As if to lend credence to the captain’s fears, the shriek of rending metal carried in from the aft decks. A shower of white-hot sparks shot skyward out of the gaping hole. The body of a man dressed in flame-retardant coveralls followed, pushed upward on a geyser of steam and flames. Leong watched helplessly as the man fell straight back down, into the same fiery pit from which he’d come.
Now he believed in Hell.
He turned to Goos. The boy was paler now, his chin quivering. He’d seen the whole thing.
“Go,” Leong said, hoping the boy would understand the instructions given in Mandarin. “Keep your—”
Something heavy hit him in the head. He saw Goos’s terrified face, and then nothing.
Goos had watched in horror as the shard of metal from a ripped container whirred in like a sawblade and struck Captain Leong in the back of the head. Goos ducked instinctively, and when he looked up, the poor man was facedown in a pool of blood and shattered glass.
The boy found himself alone on the bridge. He grabbed the intercom to call for the first officer, but it was dead. The gale moaned outside, rain and wind whipping through the shattered windows.
The radio microphone hung from the console on a coiled cord, swaying with the heaving motion of the ship.
Goos had been on the bridge during man-overboard drills. He knew how to work the radio. And if there was ever a time to call for help, it was now. What he did not know was how to speak English.
He stayed low as he reached for the dangling mic, hiding behind the captain’s chair to keep from meeting the same fate.
Goos depressed the key on the side of the mic and said the only words he knew that would get help coming his way:
“Mayday, mayday… Man overboard…”
A female voice crackled over the radio a moment later. “U.S. Coast Guard Seattle Sector, ship calling mayday, please say your location.”
“Yes!” Goos said, happy to hear a voice. “Yes! Man overboard! Please to help us!”
A horrible clatter rose from the belly of the ship, as if a dragon had gotten loose in the engine room. A moment later, the clatter abated and the steady thrum of the Wärt fell silent. Powerless, Orion shuddered and began to turn broadside to the waves, at the mercy of the gale.
Out on the demolished deck, rain did little to beat back the wall of fire, now fanned by a wicked wind. Metal groaned and men screamed. The bow began to lift as the aft portion of the ship wallowed lower in the water, flooding compartment by mangled compartment.
Goos felt the ship rise under him and huddled among the glass and debris on the floor of the wheelhouse, clutching his knees to his chest and trying to focus on the female voice speaking on the radio. He didn’t understand her, but he prayed she was sending help.
3
The straits operator, Petty Officer 3rd Class Barb Pennington, leaned back in the swivel chair, scanning the dotted traffic lanes on the six color monitors above her workstation in the Seattle Vessel Traffic Services. It was late and she’d just taken a sip of coffee when a terrified voice crackled into her headset. She rocked forward immediately, as if getting nearer to her computer screens would help her hear better.
“Chinese container ship Orion reporting a man overboard, Chief,” Petty Officer Pennington said as her supervisor walked up beside her. “AIS shows him two miles west of Pillar Point. I spoke with the vessel captain at 0114 hours when he crossed the 124 line. It sounds like a different person making the report. I was able to get him to switch to channel 16, but he’s not responding to any other questions.”
The watch supervisor nodded. “Man overboard. Understood.” He passed the call to the command duty officer in the Joint Harbor Operations Center on the other side of the frosted glass wall.
The CDO, Chief Petty Officer George Rodriguez, assigned a JHOC operations specialist named Sally Fry to monitor the call through Rescue 21, an advanced maritime C4 (computing, command, control, and communications) program. Rescue 21 used a variety of fixed towers to vector the ship’s position each time it transmitted, superimposing a line of position on a digital chart. Best case scenario, the transmission hit multiple towers and took the “search” out of search and rescue, but even one tower would put the distressed vessel somewhere along that given line.
In a calm but authoritative voice belying her junior status and twenty-three years of age, Petty Officer Fry engaged the young man at the other end of the radio in a conversation during which he said little but “Man overboard” and “Please to help.”
Both the straits operator and the operations specialist were female, and the transfer went so smoothly that the person reporting the mayday never knew he’d been passed from Vessel Traffic Services to the rescue management side of the JHOC house.
A time clock began the moment the command duty officer became aware of the distress call.
Chief Rodriguez looked across his workstation and nodded at the Operations Unit specialist, who returned the nod, letting the chief know he was already building a case in Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Among many other nuanced factors, SAROPS accounted for pre-distress vessel movement, present wind speed, and water currents, generating an estimated location of the vessel when rescue assets arrived.
Next, Rodriguez picked up the phone and activated Air Station Port Angeles to spin up their B-Zero response crew and get the ready-helo flying toward Orion. Anyone watching the process might have thought the call happened simultaneously with his other actions — and they would not be far from wrong. As command duty officer, Chief Rodriguez had the authority to send assets before even notifying his boss, the search-and-rescue mission coordinator.
The SMC made it crystal clear. When it came to SAR, the initial response of the U.S. Coast Guard was to “go there.”
The junior duty officer at Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles answered the phone on the first ring. CDO Rodriguez passed on the information to the JDO, who repeated it back, then hung up and pressed the extension for the senior duty officer, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik, pilot in command of the B-Zero response helicopter.
Each Coast Guard air station in the United States had at least one B-Zero response crew on duty at any given time. They slept next to the hangar and were ready to deploy inside a thirty-minute window. Each SDO had his or her own way of doing things, and this one liked to be called prior to the SAR launch alarm being activated.
The SDO answered quickly for so early in the morning. “This is Mr. Slaznik,” he said, his words thick with sleep. The pilots were accustomed to these middle-of-the-night calls. Lieutenant Commander Slaznik seemed to live for them.
The JDO relayed the scant information regarding Orion’s man-overboard report and the SDO repeated it back to assure the petty officer he was awake and moving.