“Give her some slack!” Amanda yelled “Let’s get some play out there!”
Tehoa nodded, hunching over the brake wheel.
Looking straight forward off the platform, Amanda could feel the wind batter at her left cheek. When she felt that wind full in her face, they would be aligned into the storm. She glanced down at the line counter on the winch station railing: 450 yards in the can and feeding rapidly as the platform gained way in its drift toward the coast.
“Stand by!.. Set your wildcat!”
Chief Tehoa spun the braking wheel, closing the wildcat jaws. The grating shriek of metal on metal overrode the storm, and the deck plates beneath their feet trembled.
There was no immediate shift in the platform’s heading. Given Floater 1’s mammoth displacement, she would be slow to react to the comparatively slight tug of the anchor cable. Amanda knew that would be the trick, to bring time, cable length, and braking strain together in one perfect balanced equation. It was impossible to make a voice heard over the audial chaos, and Amanda made a palms-down feathering gesture with her hand, instructing Chief Tehoa to play the line.
A hundred yards stripped out of the cable tier without measurable effect.
Amanda frowned in to the force of the hurricane. The driving sea had the platform solidly in its jaws and didn’t want to let go. They were still quartering. She couldn’t feel any bearing change. Her thumb jerked upward. Increase tension!
Tehoa heaved on the brake wheel, taking it up another half turn. The shriek became a piercing dentist’s drill scream. A plume of sparks sluiced from the cable guides, spraying across the sea-washed deck in front of the station.
Two hundred and fifty yards left.
A seventh wave loomed above the leading edge of the platform. Amanda’s thumb stabbed downward. Slack off! Ben Tehoa spun the wildcat wheel like a truck driver fighting a skid on an icy road.
A wall of water smashed down on the winch station. Grimly, the officer and the CPO clung to the railing and to consciousness as anchor line whipped away over the side, writhing in the cable guides like an enraged python seeking its freedom.
Amanda clawed her sodden hair out of her eyes and sought for the cable gauge in the half-light.
One hundred fifty yards remaining.
Her thumb stabbed upward repeatedly. Take it up! Go for broke! All the way!
Tehoa’s muscles bulged under the wind-tattered remnants of his khaki shirt. Jaw set in a savage grimace, he strained at the spokes of the wheel, drawing steel down on steel, levering closed the bands of the cable brake.
Lightning blazed across the sky, momentarily illuminating the decks with a flashbulb clarity. Amanda was startled to see that both she and the big Samoan CPO seemed to be covered with blood. It took her a moment to realize that it was rust flayed off the anchor cable. Mixing with the sea spray on the decks and caught by the storm winds, it blew back upon them. She could taste the iron bite of it on her tongue.
The anchor line stretched out beyond the platform, beyond the limit of vision, still angling off to port, yet as straight as a knife’s edge and as taut as a set guitar string. Its test load exceeded, the arm-thick mass of steel wire was actually stretching like a drawn rubber band. Should it snap, the broken end would whip back aboard the platform with the impact of an eight-inch shell, demolishing the winch station and any one nearby.
And yet Amanda could only continue to sign, Take it up!
And then she noted the wind. At long last the wind was edging around to strike her full in the face. Floater 1 was turning into the storm.
“A little more!” she screamed, although no one but she could hear. “Come on, a little more.”
Another massive sea struck the platform, only this time instead of flinching away from the impact, the barges lifted their heads and rode over it.
“Come on, you big bitch! Just a little more!”
The line counter snapped down from triple to double digits.
Amanda cupped her hands over the lip mike, a hideous thought striking at the same instant. Dear God, what if this headset had flooded out too!
“Drop all anchors! Drop all anchors!” She could only scream the command over and over and pray that someone would hear. And then the deck trembled under her feet and she knew they had won.
Forty-five tons of metal smashed into the Gold Coast seafloor, the massive scooplike anchors digging in, gouging trenches through the sand and bottom muck, bleeding away Floater 1’s accumulated inertia and holding fast in the face of Ivan’s wrath.
On the screen of Amanda’s handheld GPU the position stopped flickering and held steady. The screech of the wildcat brake ground down into silence, the simple roar of the storm seeming almost quiet in comparison. Amanda glanced at the cable meter.
Fourteen yards.
“Tower, this is Garrett,” she called. “I read the platform as stable by GPU fix. Do you concur?”
“We confirm that, Captain,” Gueletti replied jubilantly. “Platform is stable. Well done, ma’am! We’re going to make it.”
They were. Oriented into the face of the storm, Floater 1 rode the weather now as she had been designed to, the big barges flowing up and over the incoming rollers sequentially, the interstructural colliding and twisting relieved.
In a lightning flicker, she grinned wearily at Tehoa, who grinned back in turn, sailor to sailor.
“Lock the brake, Chief,” she called. “Let’s go get some coffee.”
Amanda started awake with the surprise of someone who hadn’t realized they had been asleep. She recalled wedging herself in place in an inactive workstation up in the command tower, intending to rest just for a moment. But that had been… when? Her accumulation of stiff and aching muscles and vertebrae indicated it must have been some time ago.
Then she noted the stillness. The tower no longer swayed wildly with excessive wave motion. The wind no longer roared and bellowed, demanding admission.
It was over.
Outside, darkness was settling over the sea. The true darkness of evening and not the shrouded dimness of the storm. Enough light yet lingered to show an abating sea, its violence spent as if it, too, had grown weary. And far away in the west a scarlet streak glowed across the horizon.
Red sky at night. / Sailor’s delight.
“Evening, Captain.” Commander Gueletti stood backlit by the console screens. “Looks like the show’s over.”
“Looks like,” Amanda agreed, standing and stretching out a multitude of kinked muscles. “Where’s Chief Tehoa?”
“He’s back down working with the damage-control parties. A hell of a good man, that.”
“I won’t argue that point. How are we standing, Commander?”
“It could have been a whole lot worse,” the Seabee replied. “We haven’t found any appreciable frame damage in any of the barges yet, and we didn’t lose any plates. We’re pumping out the flooded cells now. I think we can patch her up well enough to stay on station.”
“How about our running gear?”
“It’s torn up some, and we lost a couple of modules over the side. Nothing we can’t fix or do without, though.”
Amanda nodded, running a hand through her salt-sticky hair. Maybe a hot shower wasn’t such an impossible dream after all. “Do we have damage reports in from the other bases?”
“No appreciable damage at Conakry, and Abidjan just got an extra-heavy rain squall. Our people at Conakry are already asking when we want them back.”