Even with a couple of hundred people remaining on the platform, Amanda felt suddenly very much alone.
“The squadron get off okay, ma’am?” A massive form moved up beside her at the rail.
Startled, Amanda looked up at Ben Tehoa. “Chief? What are you still doing here?”
“Same thing you are, Captain.” The big CPO grinned back. “These Construction Battalion guys are real good at building airports and grading roads and such, but they’re going to need the help of a couple of real sailors before this show’s over.”
Dawn found the platform’s skeleton crew still hard at work, making final preparations for the oncoming storm. The sun rose in colors of dirty green and tarnished bronze, and the moisture-saturated air hung deathly still, lying on the chest like a coffin lid. The sea roiled, the wave patterns broken and irregular now, as if the waters themselves had grown fearful and were seeking escape.
Working with Chief Tehoa, Amanda supervised the deployment of a last few yards of lifeline. But suddenly she brought herself up short, her ears clicking and popping in response to a drop in barometric pressure so abrupt as to be physically sensed.
Looking up, she found that a stillness had fallen on the decks of Floater 1. Almost everyone else on the decks had paused as well, staring away to seaward.
It was as if the sea and sky to the south were coagulating, the horizon wrinkling and collapsing inward like melting cellophane. And then Amanda realized that it was no optical illusion. She was looking at the leading edge of Hurricane Ivan, sweeping down upon them like an atmospheric avalanche.
“Well,” Chief Tehoa commented mildly. “Here she comes.”
To Amanda it was an anarchistic, Wagnerian symphony played by an orchestra of insane gods. The wind instruments were the winds themselves, treble howl and base bellow and a thousand heterodyned variants between. The strings played from the platform’s network of guy wires and tie-downs, thrumming and shrieking as the tempest plucked at them madly.
And the sea mastered the percussion section. Towering ranks of spume-fringed waves beat upon Floater 1. Crashing down upon the inundated decks, they drove the barge segments together with a kettledrumming boom, the impact of each comber radiating upward through the platform structure. Gritting her teeth in a snarl of effort, Amanda drew herself forward from the core barge along one of the fore-and-aft lifelines. Her tightly laced life jacket served more as a shield against the high-velocity bite of the windblown rain than it did as a protection against a possible drowning. No one going over the side in this sea-spawned holocaust could hope to survive.
It was midmorning, yet only the dimmest tinge of gray daylight cut the murky darkness, supplementing the flickering gleam of the few surviving deck-side work arcs. And vision full into the blast of the hurricane was flatly impossible.
Twisting her left wrist into the lifeline to hold herself in place, Amanda covered her eyes with her right hand, leaving a slit parted between her fingers. The old typhoon fighter’s trick worked as well here in the Atlantic as it did in the China Sea. With her sight partially shielded, she could look into the face of the storm, seeking Chief Tehoa.
The Chief and a Seabee work party were on deck doing direct battle with the hurricane. A fight Amanda feared they had no chance of winning.
As the tempest had mounted and the storm-driven waves had grown higher, the platform crew had been forced to uncouple the hard links joining the nine superbarges that made up Floater 1. Opening the hard links allowed the barges to ride with the seas more easily, and a failure to do so would have resulted in the couplings being torn bodily out of the barge hulls as the wave action exceeded their play limits.
However, even as links kept the barges together, they also served to keep them separate. Interconnected now by only a network of mooring hawsers, the massive barges slammed and jostled into each other with each oncoming wave. Work details were forced to sortie out onto the decks in an agonizing effort to keep the platform components wedged apart.
Ben Tehoa led one such team now, working at the juncture point between four of the barges. Tethered off on their lifelines and with their water-sodden clothing whipping at their bodies, the seamen stood back and warily regarded the monster.
The cover plates that bridged the gaps between the platform sections were long gone, blown aside by the wave action. The yard-wide spaces between the barge hulls now gaped open and smashed closed, four sets of gnashing steel jaws waiting to pulp anything or anyone that might slip between them. Intermittently, as a storm comber crawled under the hulls, a sheeting geyser of seawater would explode upward through the gaps, the tearing wind shredding the curtain of ejected water away into a cloud of stinging salt mist.
Bearing a massive manila ship’s fender, Tehoa and his men hunkered down against the force of the wind, awaiting the moment when the jaws would open again.
As Amanda looked on, it came, the barges lifting with the swell and the gaps opening in response. Faintly she heard Tehoa’s wordless shout and the detail lunged forward, seeking to thrust the gag into the monster’s mouth.
For an instant, Amanda thought they might succeed. Then the sea slumped away beneath the platform and a roaring jet of storm-compressed water and air fountained skyward, hurling the fender away and knocking the work party sprawling.
One seaman, fouled in his own lifeline and caught in the reversing rush of the seawater, was swept to the edge of the gap. As the sailor was on the verge of toppling between the barges, Tehoa lunged for the man. Catching his arm, the Chief hauled him away from death. Outraged at the loss of their prey, the steel jaws snapped shut with a reverberating crash.
Battered and beaten, the work party drew back into the windbreak of a deck module to regroup and reassess. Amanda joined them behind the shelter.
“How is it going, Chief?” she yelled into Tehoa’s ear.
“Not good!” the big man bellowed back over the storm clamor. “Not good! It’s hell keeping the fenders in place, and they don’t help all that much when we can!”
“What about air bags?”
“Totally useless! The barges chew ’em up like bubble gum. Problem is, we’re quartering into the weather! She ain’t riding clean!”
Proving his point, another storm roller broke across Floater 1. Impacting on the port-side forward angle of the platform, its force twisted and jammed the barge complex together in ways it was not designed for.
The beam of a battle lantern flashed across the Chief and Amanda as another seaman collapsed into the shelter of the deck module. “Chief,” the sailor raked spray-sodden hair out of a pair of frightened eyes, “we got trouble! We got water coming in!”
“Where?” Amanda demanded.
“This corner of Outboard Four. The next barge to port, ma’am.”
“Let’s go!”
The passage to the crisis point entailed a carefully gauged leap between the two superbarges, aided only by a wildly whipping lifeline, then a plunge down through a deck hatch. Within the massive platform segment, they were sheltered from the bite of rain and spray and the maniacal howl of the hurricane was at least muffled. Now, however, could be heard the squeal and creak of steel under stress, and the rolling crash of one barge against another reverberated like a thunderbolt.
Each barge had been compartmentalized into hundreds of smaller interconnected cells. The upper-level spaces were used for dry supply and equipment storage. Deeper in the massive hulls, below the waterline, could be found tankage for drinking water and fuel. Amanda, the Chief, and their guide descended to these decks via a series of narrow, condensation-slick ladders.