Gale Force

44

The helicopter dropped McKenna and her crew on the Lion’s starboard weather deck, high above the water—or more accurately, onto the wall of the accommodations house on the starboard side of the ship. From there, the Gale Force team descended to the cargo holds through an access hatch amidships and a long, dark, tilting stairwell. Ridley remained topside.

The rest of the crew had tied off lines and dropped them into the abyss, then tied loops in the lines to create hand- and footholds to aid the descent. They all wore climbing harnesses and bright headlamps, and they clipped their harnesses into the loops in the ropes as they descended.

Safety first.

It was quieter inside the ship, out of the wind, though the swell swayed the ropes every time a wave hit. McKenna made sure she stayed clipped in at all times. It was a long way to fall if she made a mistake.

There were nine cargo decks on the Lion, decks four through twelve. McKenna and the team headed straight to the bottom. It was a long climb down, damp and cold, with the crew’s rhythmic breathing as they dropped, the rush of the wind past the postage-stamp patch of daylight above, the crash of the ocean, and the maddening tilt of the stairs, a nine-story drop in the dark.

Finally, McKenna reached bottom, a dark, geometric mishmash of shapes and angles, a watertight bulkhead door mounted on a wall that was now a floor. Beyond it lay the first cargo hold.

There was another watertight door, too, in what had been the floor. It led deeper into the ship, to the decks and passageways beneath the cargo holds. The crew would need to access those areas to check fluid levels in the fuel and water tanks, but for now McKenna had her eyes on a deckload of Nissans.

Matt and Stacey Jonas touched down shortly after McKenna, then Court Harrington behind them. The Jonases were breathing heavily, flushed with exertion. Court nudged Stacey. “Long way from Baja, huh?”

Stacey smiled, unbowed. “Yeah, but the company’s better.”

“This deck isn’t going to be underwater when we open the door, right?” McKenna asked Harrington. “I don’t really want to drown today.”

Harrington checked his laptop. “There is water in there, but I don’t think this deck is fully flooded. Not based on my calculations, anyway.”

“How much do you trust your calculations?” Matt asked.

“Completely.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” McKenna said, turning a wheel on the bulkhead to unlock the door. She held her breath as the door unlatched, ready for water to burst through—but nothing happened. McKenna opened the door slowly, peered through. Didn’t see water.

What she did see, though, were cars. Row after row of cars, hanging precariously from their mounts on the oily deck. They descended in straight lines, fore and aft, strapped in by heavy-duty tie-down lines, every one of which seemed to protest every time a wave hit the ship. There were hundreds of cars—five thousand of them—dark and ghostly and ominous, descending from the high starboard side of the hold down toward the portside, outlasting the beam of McKenna’s headlamp and disappearing into the darkness.

And somewhere down there, McKenna could hear water.

“We have fluid in this hold, as expected,” she told the crew. “Court’s right. Let’s strap in and find it.”

Matt Jonas tied off another line at the bottom of the stairs, dropped it through the bulkhead door, then a second line. There wasn’t enough room between the cars for a third, so McKenna would follow Harrington down on his line, one at a time, using the deck for handholds when they reached the portside of the ship and the water.

Stacey dropped in first. The diver climbed down steadily, no sign of hesitation, no fear. McKenna knew she wasn’t susceptible to claustrophobia or anxiety or panic attacks. She was calm, and she would keep her head, even if things went awry.

And they could very easily go awry. The Lion had three massive seven-story cargo ramps for offloading and unloading cargo. The main door sat at the stern, starboard side, well above the waterline. The second one lay amidships, also on the starboard side, so it wouldn’t be a problem, either. The third, though, was on the portside amidships, and because of the way the Lion lay in the water, much of that third door was also submerged. It was supposed to be watertight, but there was already water in the hold. Odds were the door was probably leaking, in addition to the vents above, and if it blew out, seawater would flood the hold within minutes.

But there was no sense worrying about that right now. The door hadn’t blown yet.

Court Harrington dropped through the hole next. McKenna gave him a minute. Beside her, Matt Jonas watched, stone-faced and silent. If he was worried about his wife down there, he wasn’t showing it.

McKenna met his eye and he smiled back at her. “Go get ’em, skipper.”

Here goes. She clipped onto the rope and backed through the bulkhead door.

The deck was slick, covered in leaking oil from the fleet of hanging Nissans, and McKenna struggled for traction as she walked herself backward. The cars surrounded her. The ship swayed, and the cars shifted and creaked on their bindings, their deadly potential impossible to ignore.

Then Stacey called up. “Found it. Geez, McKenna, there’s a lot of water down here.”

Stacey and Harrington were about ten feet below McKenna, waiting at the edge of a lake of green oily water. McKenna could see at least two full rows of cars trapped beneath the surface, maybe more. It was murky down there. The submerged cars looked eerie, shipwrecks in the shadows. But the water wasn’t visibly rising, and that was good news.

Stacey reached into a pack around her waist, and pulled out a distance finder, a little laser box similar to an electronic tape measure from the hardware store. She lowered herself as close as she could to the surface of the water, aimed the finder across to where the water met the top of the hold, and reported the distance to Harrington. Then she aimed the finder into the water, between a row of cars, and called out the distance to the portside hull.

Harrington copied the distances into his notebook. “Basic trigonometry,” he told McKenna. “If we can get an idea how much water’s leaked into this hold, we’ll know how the ship will respond when we turn the pumps on her.”

“Perfect.” McKenna peered over the architect’s shoulder at his chicken-scratch handwriting. “So how much water are we dealing with?”

“Let’s see.” Harrington tapped his pencil on the notebook as Stacey called out another measurement. “Factoring the length of the ship, the cars in the water, the water on the decks below…” He paused, wrote down a couple figures. “I estimate we’re dealing with approximately fifteen hundred tons of leakage. And there’s more coming in with every wave this ship takes.”

McKenna studied the architect’s notebook again. Couldn’t make high or low of anything on the page. “That’s a lot of water,” she said. “Do you maybe want to run topside, check your work on a calculator?”

Harrington shook his head, because of course he was never wrong. “Not necessary. This is pretty basic math, McKenna. Now all we need to do is get measurements for the other fluids on board the ship—oil and ballast and drinking water and whatnot—and we’re good to go.”

Another wave hit the ship, rocking the cars on their moorings. McKenna pictured the vents up top, a few feet from the surface, pictured more seawater spilling down inside them every few seconds. There were thirty-three tanks on the Pacific Lion, all of them needing measurements. The gale was building outside. There was no time to waste.

“We need to do this in stages,” she told Harrington. “This ship won’t survive the storm unless we can prevent those vents from flooding.”

“We could block them off,” Stacey suggested from the waterline. “Weld steel plates over the holes. We have the equipment.”

McKenna mulled it over. Didn’t really like the idea of parking the Gale Force under the Lion for any length of time, not in this weather. “What else do we have?”

Harrington wrote something in his notebook. “If we can pump all this floodwater out of the hold, we correct…” He tapped his pencil again. “Eight degrees of the list, right away. That would move us from the current sixty-three to a more manageable fifty-five.”

“That should give us clearance,” McKenna said. “Move those vents higher above the waterline before the storm gets much worse.”

“That’s a lot of pumping, McKenna,” Stacey said. “It’ll take all night to get that water out.”

McKenna thought about her bunk on the Gale Force, Jason Parent’s cooking. Not tonight, girl.

“That sounds about right,” she replied. “So we’d better get started.”