Devil's Gate

6

AS THE KINJARA MARU FOUNDERED, Kurt Austin scrambled forward and up the sloping deck. The footing was treacherous where the deck had become coated with water, oil, and sludge. He pulled himself upward with anything he could grasp.

Reaching the ladder that led up to the crane, Kurt climbed it, catching sight of the pirates racing away to the south. Putting them out of his mind and hanging on to the railing, he reached the crane operator’s hutch.

A strangely shaped folding knife with a black handle and a steel or titanium blade stood on its point, embedded into the crane operator’s seat. A little present left behind by the thug who’d strung the woman up. Kurt grabbed it, folded it up, and slid it into a pocket.

Turning to the control panel, he checked for power. Thankfully, the lights on the panel remained illuminated.

“Hold on,” he shouted to the woman, realizing even as he spoke that she wasn’t holding anything at all, but guessing that “Hang in there” would have had a terrible ring to it.

Years in the salvage business had left Kurt very familiar with cranes. He grabbed for the control handle that would retract the crane back to his position. As he operated the lever he heard a whirring sound, and the crane jerked backward a few feet and then slammed to a halt. The poor woman swung back and forth like a pendulum, crying and screaming in pain. Seconds later a hydraulic warning light came on.

It was only then that Kurt noticed red liquid pouring down the side of the crane. He glanced and saw that the hydraulic line had been cut clean through. Now the little gift made sense to him. He could almost hear the thug laughing.

His headset crackled.

“Kurt, we’re off the ship, but you should know that we can see the top of the rudder. The fantail of this thing is coming out of the water.”

Kurt looked forward. The front quarter of the ship was submerged, debris floating everywhere. Time was running out fast.

With the crane dead, he had little choice. He dropped his rifle and began to climb out onto the crane’s boom. It was a tricky crawl made worse by the grease, oil, and hydraulic fluid. Trying to keep the boom underneath him, he scooted forward.

From behind him, a group of steel barrels came tumbling down the deck. One of them hit something sharp, sparked, and then exploded. The blast knocked Kurt sideways. His feet slipped, and the weight of his boots threatened to drag him off the boom.

Ahead of him, the woman screamed, sobbing as she shouted out to him. “Please,” she begged. “Please hurry.”

Kurt was doing all he could just to hang on. He glanced back. Fire enveloped the hutch he had been standing in only moments before. Moving had been a lucky break, but not if it just postponed the inevitable.

He swung his legs to one side and then back the other way and up, catching the boom with one leg. A smaller secondary explosion echoed from below as the smell of kerosene enveloped him. Down through black smoke, Kurt could see flames licking across the water as the burning fuel spread, blasts of heat roasting him as he moved forward.

Another ten feet and he reached the spot where the woman was hooked. The wire wrapped around her wrists was slicing into her skin. Her arms were scarlet with flowing blood, and her face was pasty white.

He grabbed her by the arms and tried to pull her up, but he had no leverage. Swirling waves of heat rose up from the crackling fires below. The ship shuddered as something internal broke loose. One of the engines or even the cargo sliding around.

“Kurt, she’s going,” came the call over the radio. “Any minute she’s going.”

I’m aware of that, Kurt thought. He grabbed her arms again.

“Pull yourself up,” he shouted.

“I can’t,” she cried. “My shoulder is out.”

That didn’t surprise Kurt. But it left him with only one choice.

He grabbed the knife from his pocket, flipped it open, and slid it under the wire that held the woman. Trying desperately not to cut her but knowing he didn’t have much time, Kurt began to saw. The wire snapped all at once, and the young woman plunged toward the ocean.

Kurt pushed off and dropped in after her.

Smoke and fire passed him in an instant. He hit the water, and felt one leg strike something beneath it. When he came up, the woman was right in front of him, bravely trying to tread water with one arm.

Kurt grabbed her and splashed away from the flames of burning gas and oil. Quickly, he realized a much greater danger. The water was swirling around them. He felt it pulling at his feet like the undertow at the beach.

The ship was going down.

He looked aft. The fantail had risen up like the Titanic, the bow was beginning to plunge.

Grabbing the woman’s good arm, he began to swim, pulling her along. When the ship went down, it would create a massive wave of suction dragging everything within a hundred-foot radius down with it. Both of them would be long drowned before it released their bodies back to the surface.

It was hopeless, but he swam hard anyway. And then the fast boat from the Argo suddenly raced in. It slid to a stop beside them.

The men rapidly hauled the woman in, literally yanking her out of the water, as Kurt pulled himself over the side. The engines roared again.

Kurt fell into the back of the boat. Looking up he saw the “castle”—the five-story structure that housed the crew’s quarters and the bridge and the antenna masts — plunging toward them at a forty-five-degree angle, like a building falling out of the sky.

The fast boat leapt forward like a stallion as the pilot slammed the throttle home. Right out into daylight.

The castle crashed into the water no more than twenty feet behind them. A surge of foam hurled them along and then spat them out like a surfer ejecting from a massive breaker.

Seconds later the Kinjara Maru was gone.

As they sped away, heavy rumbling sounds rose up from the depths, along with surges of air and debris.

Kurt looked at the woman. She was covered in soot and oil, her shoulder was either broken or separated, her wrists were gashed by the wire that had cut into them, and her eyes were swollen and almost as red as the blood that soaked her clothes. Using her less injured hand, she placed pressure on the gash on her other wrist.

“We have a doctor aboard the ship,” Kurt said. “He’ll tend to your injuries as soon as we board.”

She nodded. At least she was alive.

“To the Argo?” the helmsman asked.

Kurt nodded. “Unless you have somewhere else in mind?”

The helmsman shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, and pointed the boat toward the Argo.

TEN MINUTES LATER, they were back on board the Argo. While the ship’s doctor tended to the young woman and the away team stowed the fast boat, Kurt stepped onto the bridge.

The ship was already accelerating and changing course.

“You look like hell,” Captain Haynes said. “Why aren’t you in sick bay?”

“Because I’m not sick,” Kurt replied.

The captain eyed Kurt strangely and then looked past him. “Somebody get this man a towel. He’s dripping all over my bridge.”

An ensign tossed him a towel, which Kurt used to dry his face and hair. “Can we catch them?” he asked.

Haynes glanced at the radar screen. “They’re faster than us, doing forty knots. But a little boat like that didn’t bring these boys all the way from Africa. I’ll bet you a steak dinner they’re heading for a mother ship somewhere.”

Kurt nodded. Pirates had become more sophisticated in recent years. While most still operated from little hamlets along the coasts of poor Third World nations, some had larger vessels that took them out to sea. Mother ships, disguised as old freighters and such.

They hid their tricked-out speedboats inside and often used semi-legitimate voyages to disguise their true purpose. Kurt had heard from one authority that the pirates would be easy to catch if someone would just look for the freighters that constantly dropped off cargo without ever picking any up. But then the buyers were too smart to ask where goods came from when they were getting such great deals.

“Anything on radar?” Kurt asked.

“Nothing yet,” Haynes said.

As dry as he was going to get, Kurt tossed the towel and picked up the captain’s binoculars, gazing out toward the target.

The fleeing boat itself was hard to see, but the long white wake it left was a giant arrow pointing right to it. They were five miles off, and putting the Argo farther behind, but it would take hours for them to escape radar range, and by that time…

A flash caught Kurt by surprise, momentarily blinding him through the binoculars. Immediately following it, Kurt saw debris flying in all directions and an expanding cloud.

“What in the world…”

A few seconds later the sound reached them. A single low boom, like a massive firework had gone off. When the view cleared, the speedboat was gone; obliterated in a single, thundering explosion.