Island 731

6.

The roiling water carried a slick of worn plastic chips past Hawkins’s feet with enough force to sweep them out from under him. If not for the railings he clutched by both hands, he would have toppled down the stairs. He felt thankful that Joliet and Bray had been holding the railings, as well, or they would have all fallen together.

As the ship canted in the other direction, the flow of water stopped. We’re not sinking, Hawkins told himself, a wave just found a way inside.

“Mark!” Joliet shouted from above. She’d reached the top of the stairs on the main deck and fought to stay upright on the sharply tilting, very wet floor. “A door is open!”

Hawkins reached the top of the stairs right behind Bray. Nearly horizontal rain whipped into the hallway, stinging his face. Had Joliet lost her balance and fallen, she’d have been tossed out the open door, over the rail of the main deck, and into the torrid ocean. As the ship tilted, pushing them away from the open door, a flash of lightning lit the scene outside the door.

A cresting twenty-five-foot wave laden with garbage reached out for them like a giant. They were about to be pulverized. Hawkins struggled to climb the steepening floor, hoping to reach the door before the wave.

“Take my arm!” Bray shouted. He held onto the stairway railing with one hand and stretched out the other to Hawkins. “We’ll both pull.”

Understanding what the man had in mind, Hawkins reached forward and took Bray’s hand. They pulled in unison, accelerating Hawkins up the incline. He’d covered half the distance when his speed dropped quickly. The ship was still listing. Desperation fueled his leap and he caught hold of the open metal door with the tips of his fingers.

Thunder boomed through the opening door, so close that it made his ears ring. But it didn’t slow him because he knew the next boom would be the wave striking the ship. He pulled himself up the door, found his footing, and pushed against the heavy metal. His progress felt impossibly slow, but he managed to get the watertight door closed. The first drops of the descending wave hissed against the hull as Hawkins took hold of the locking wheel and gave it a spin.

The door’s locking pins snapped into place, securing the hatch and keeping the water at bay, but it did little to spare the ship, or Hawkins, against the force of the wave. The impact pushed the ship to a forty-five-degree angle and tossed Hawkins away from the door as though it had exploded.

Hawkins shouted as he fell toward the other side of the ship. But his topple was cut short as something snagged his shirt. He swung to the side and struck the wall hard, but not nearly as hard as he would have struck the far wall. When Bray shouted a strained “Yearg!” Hawkins knew that it was the big man who had caught him. And likely saved his life.

When the ship righted itself, Bray let go of Hawkins’s now stretched-out T-shirt and rubbed his shoulder.

“You okay?” Hawkins asked.

Bray rolled his shoulder around. “You owe me one.”

“I’ll give you one of the beers Joliet already owes me,” Hawkins said with a grin and gave Bray a pat on the shoulder, causing the man to wince.

“Let’s go!” Joliet shouted as she started up the next staircase. They were still three flights below the bridge.

With no more open hatches along the way, the ascent went more smoothly, though they were still tossed back and forth. Beaten and bruised, they staggered up the last flight of stairs only to find the door leading to the wheelhouse locked.

Joliet wasted no time hammering the door with her fist.

Peter Blok, the ship’s first mate, unlatched the door quickly, shouting, “Cahill, where the hell have you—?” Blok looked like he’d been slapped in the face when he realized who was at the door. His eyes were wide behind his wire-rim glasses, but his eyebrows were furrowed in frustration. “What are you three—you’re supposed to be confined to quarters!”

“What’s going on up here?” Hawkins asked, though it sounded more like a demand. “We’re being pummeled down there.”

“We don’t have time for this right now,” Blok said. The man spent most of his free time reading novels, and he was generally soft-spoken. His raised voice instantly alerted Hawkins to the seriousness of their situation.

“The computer’s fried,” Blok said. “We’re sailing blind.”

“We’re not sailing at all,” came the angry voice of Captain Drake. He arrived a moment later. “If they want to see the end coming, I won’t deny them that.” He looked Hawkins in the eyes. “Just stay out of the way. Clear?”

Hawkins nodded and stepped past the seamen with Bray and Joliet in tow. The ship rolled, forcing everyone to cling to whatever nearby bolted-down object they could find. “Is no one steering the ship?” Hawkins asked.

“Can’t,” Drake said. “Controls aren’t responding.”

Bray’s eyes widened. “We’re dead in the water?”

“Not exactly,” Blok said. “The ship’s systems are functioning. We’re just not in control of them.”

“How is that possible?” Joliet asked.

“The Magellan is run by computers. Every system—navigation, communications, environmental—everything, is managed by the computers,” Drake said. “And those computers have a mind of their own at the moment.”

Hawkins looked out over the wheelhouse. Every computer screen flickered, offering brief glimpses of the aberrant system. Even the radar screen was a jumbled mess of green lines and random blobs of color. The three other crewmen in the wheelhouse just clung to their stations with white knuckles. There was nothing else to be done.

Hawkins nearly asked if they’d tried switching the ship to manual control, but decided the question would insult Drake. Of course he’d tried. An old sailor like Drake would probably prefer to spend the night behind the wheel, battling the storm on his own rather than let the computer take control. But there was another possibility. “Could it be a computer virus?”

Drake shrugged. “Not my area of expertise.”

“What about Kam?” Joliet asked.

“We sent Cahill to find him fifteen minutes ago,” Blok said as the ship rolled hard in the other direction. He stumbled, but Hawkins caught him by the arm and kept him upright.

Ryan Cahill was both the second mate and the ship’s medic. When the storm abated Hawkins thought the man would have his hands full. “We just came from the science quarters,” Hawkins said. “Cahill’s not down there.”

“Neither is Kam,” Joliet added. “We didn’t see either—oh, no…”

“What is it?” Drake asked.

Hawkins knew what Joliet was thinking and answered for her. “The stairwell hatch on the main deck was open. Took at least one wave, maybe two before we closed it. It’s possible one, or both of them, went outside.”

The ship tilted back as it rose up over a wave, spilling Daniel Sanchez, a deck hand, to the floor where he slid until he hit the back wall. His head struck the metal wall hard. He slumped to the floor. Bray made his way to the man and knelt down. “He’s unconscious.”

“Dammit,” Drake grumbled, then shouted to the other men. “I thought I told you three to strap in!” He turned to his new arrivals and repeated the message. “That goes for all of you, if you want to stay. Pick a seat and strap yourself in.”

“What about Kam and Cahill?” Joliet asked.

Drake gave her a look that said, Do not argue. “If they’re outside, they’re dead, and there is not a thing you can do about it. Now sit yourself down and—”

“Sir!” Jeff Allen, a young deckhand, shouted. This was his first long-term voyage aboard the Magellan and the storm had managed to bleach his normally tan complexion.

As the ship tipped forward over the crest of the wave, Drake made his way to the front of the wheelhouse. Ignoring the captain’s orders, Hawkins, Joliet, Bray, and Blok followed him to the front windows, where a battery of windshield wipers were losing the battle against the endless sheets of rain.

They peered out the fore windows and saw a curved, trash-filled ocean in the bright glow of the Magellan’s floodlights. The ship entered the trough between waves, leveling out, but the view didn’t change.

“Oh my God,” Bray said, backing away from the window.

Hawkins followed the vertical wall of garbage up. It disappeared into the darkness above the ship. A flash of lightning illuminated what Bray must have already realized—a fifty-foot wall of garbage-laden ocean was about to crash down on them. This wave couldn’t be climbed. The Magellan would have to go through it.

“Hold on to something!” Drake shouted as he dove to the floor and held on to the base of a bolted-down chair.

The last thing Hawkins saw was a frothy wall of white dropping on them like a mammoth curtain call. Then there was a sound like thunder, but louder, and a jarring impact that sent him sailing. He blinked once, caught a glimpse of a refrigerator, felt a momentary pain in his head, and then, nothing.