We both popped to the surface at the same time. Our boat was gone except for what looked like the front one-third, which was upside down and bobbing around in a debris field of fiberglass bits, flotation foam, and gasoline. Tony was gagging on a mouthful of gasoline and saltwater; I wasn’t yet in the fuel slick, but the stink was strong. I paddled backward away from the smell and looked for the Keeper, but there was no sign of her, just a muffled rumble of engines disappearing. Then a small wave broke over me from behind, and when I went under, I realized that my clothes were really heavy. It took me several seconds to get my head above water again, and even though I was a strong swimmer, I felt a moment of panic in that black water. That cold, black water.
“You hurt, boss?” Tony called from somewhere in the darkness. I tried to spot him, but the dark out there was absolute, except for the regular pulsing of the sea buoy light.
The sea buoy.
If we could get up on that thing, we might not freeze to death quite so quickly.
“I’m okay, I think,” I shouted back. “How about you?”
“Got a cut on my arm, but I don’t think anything’s busted,” he called back.
“Tell it not to bleed,” I called. I didn’t have to tell him why.
“Where are you?”
“Over here,” I called, raising my right arm, which promptly caused me to submerge under the next wave.
“I’m hanging on to the bow,” he shouted. He sounded farther away, which wasn’t a good sign. “Here. Over here.”
I tried to pop up out of the water, but my clothes weighed me down. I did, however, catch a glimpse of something white over to my right, so I began swimming in that direction. The seas were rising and smacking me from every direction, but I knew I had to get going before hypothermia worked its deadly spell on my shivering body.
Five minutes of thrashing brought me up next to the floating bow section. Tony was holding on with his left arm to a big crack in the fiberglass, and I thought I could see black rivulets running down his hand. He reached out with his right and pulled me alongside. I was more tired than I should have been, but the weight of my clothes had been a real surprise. The gasoline smell was gone now.
“Why’s this part still afloat?” I asked.
“Unsinkable, remember?” he said. “It’ll float until it gets waterlogged.”
“How long’s that?”
“We’ll be dead of hypothermia long before that happens,” he said with a crazy grin. Leave it to Tony to feel this was just another adventure.
“Try for that buoy?” I asked.
“What buoy?”
I looked around and realized I could no longer see the flashes of light.
“It’s anchored,” Tony said. “We’re not. Tide’s coming in, so we’re drifting away from that thing.” He spat out some water and rubbed the gash on his arm. “I think we’re fucked.”
“Well, at least we know who the bad guy is,” I said, and then realized that, no, we really didn’t. I couldn’t prove that it had been Trask driving that boat. I tried to get my bearings, but the waves were just high enough to block our view. I was getting really tired now, and my arms and legs were beginning to numb up a little. My running shoes felt like a couple of bricks. I remembered seeing one of those time-versus-temperature life-expectancy tables for people adrift in cold water, and quickly put it out of my mind.
“Whoa,” Tony said, looking over my shoulder. “I think that’s a ship.”
I turned around, wiped the saltwater out of my eyes, and looked where he was looking. At first I didn’t see anything, then I did: two white lights, one over the other. It looked to be a long, long way away, though, up in the direction of the container port.
“She’s coming right at us,” Tony said. “Those are the masthead and range lights. I can’t see running lights.”
“Too far,” I gulped, bouncing in the water to see over the hump of the shattered bow section. My fingers were like ice.
“Or she’s really big and not far off,” Tony said. “Oh, fuck!”
He was right and I was wrong. She was really, really big and she was right here. We could hear the crashing of the bow wave and feel the engine vibrations thumping through the water. It had to be one of those giant container ships, which looked big enough alongside the pier. When you get face-to-face with one in the water and can count rivets, big doesn’t begin to describe it. With our own radar at short range, we’d missed it.
Then we were lifting out of the water as the pressure swell from the bulbous bow thrust us aside like two fleas and deposited us and our bow fragment right alongside the towering black steel wall of her port side, which hissed past us in the darkness. I thought about yelling for help, but it would have been like hollering up at an iceberg, with about as much effect. I wanted to swim away from those massive steel plates, vividly mindful of some very big propellers that were coming our way, but neither of us could really move. Our tiny wreck bounced along the side of the ship, spinning gently each time we bumped up against the sliding hull, and it was all we could do to hang on. Twice we were hit in the face by hot water coming from overboard discharges.
Finally the slope of the moving steel mountain changed to an overhang as her stern came up on us. We both instinctively looked up into the white light of her stern light, above which we saw a lone face looking down into the wake. And directly at us.
We saw the man’s head snap up and his slanted eyes go wide when he spotted us, but then we disappeared out of the stern light as the monster spat us out into her broad, smooth wake. The wash from her propellers coiled the water like a field of hissing snakes. Then we heard a wonderful sound: the deep, booming groan of her ship’s whistle. Three blasts, which Tony said meant she was backing down. With any luck at all, we were now unfucked, and just in time, too. The remains of the wake were dissipating, and we could see glinting, finny figures darting through the disturbed water, hunting for delicacies stirred up by the giant ship’s passage. Out on the margins of all the activity were a couple of really big fins, moving slowly, biding their time. Through chattering teeth, I prayed they were porpoises.
Forty-five freezing minutes later, we were huddled in the ship’s motorboat under two soggy blankets each, as the coxswain maneuvered under the boat falls dangling down from the darkness above. I’ve been cold before, but never like this. My bones felt like rubber, and I wanted desperately to sleep. None of the boat crew spoke a word of English, but they were expert seamen, and they’d been directed back to our position in the dark by someone who knew what he was doing, too.
Once on board we stumbled across acres and acres of steel deck to the massive superstructure amidships. They indicated we needed to climb the interior stairways, but I simply couldn’t do it, and Tony slid down to the deck and hung his head on his chest. When they saw the blood leaking down his wrist, there was more excited radio chatter. Apparently the damned ship was so big they used radios to communicate inside as well as outside. A few minutes later, a medical team arrived and we were carried on stretchers to the ship’s sick bay. They stripped off our wet clothes and rolled us up into yet more blankets, which produced about twenty minutes’ worth of chattering teeth. A cup of hot tea, loaded with sugar, helped a lot, while the medical attendant worked on Tony’s forearm. Then a ruddy-faced, bearded Englishman stuck his head into the sick bay and welcomed us aboard his ship.
“Right, then,” he said approvingly. “We’ve got one of your Coast Guard helicopters en route. Drink up, we’ll get you some dry coveralls, and then we’ll see how well the pilot does with our landing spot.” He looked slyly over at the medical guy doing his thing with Tony’s arm, whipped out a flask, and dropped a wee dram of something wonderful into my tea.