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All hope is gone . . .
With a scream, she writhed in the grip of the demon, and with a sudden, immense force of will she managed to break free. She threw herself back from the fire, turned and ran through the door, and suddenly she was falling, falling through the house, through the basements, the sub-cellars, falling . . .
66
THE STORM RAGED BEYOND THE OPEN RAILS OF HALF DECK 7, SPRAY sweeping across the deck despite their being sixty feet above the waterline. Liu could hardly think over the boom of the sea and the bellow of the wind.
Crowley came up, as soaked as he was. “Are we really going to try this, sir?”
“You got a better idea?” Liu replied irritably. “Give me your radio.”
Crowley handed it over.
Liu tuned it to cha
“This is Bruce.”
“How do you read me?”
“Five by five.”
“Good. Buckle yourself into the coxswain’s station at the helm. Welch should take the seat across the aisle.”
“Already done.”
“Need any instructions?”
“They seem to be all right here.”
“The lifeboat’s almost completely automatic,” Liu went on. “The engine starts automatically on impact. It’ll drive the lifeboat away from the ship in a straight line. You should throttle down to steerageway speed only—they’ll find you quicker that way. The master panel should be pretty self-explanatory to a nautical man.”
“Right. Got an EPIRB on this crazy boat?”
“Two, and they’re actually the latest GPIRBs, which transmit your GPS coordinates. On impact, the GPIRB automatically activates at 406 and 121.5 megahertz—no action required on your part. Keep the lifeboat’s VHF tuned to emergency cha
“Understood.”
“Questions?”
“No.”
“Ready?”
“Ready.” Bruce’s voice crackled over the handheld.
“Okay. There’s a fifteen-second automatic countdown. Lock down the transmit button so we can hear what happens. Talk to me as soon as possible after you hit.”
“Understood. Fire away.”
Liu turned to the freefall launch control panel. There were thirty-six lifeboats, eighteen on the port side and eighteen on starboard, each with a capacity of up to 150 people. Even launching one boat virtually empty like this, they still had plenty of capacity to spare. He glanced at his watch. If it worked, they’d have fifty minutes to evacuate the ship. A very doable proposition.
He murmured a short prayer.
As he initiated the launch sequence, Liu began to breathe a little easier. It
was
going to work. These damn boats were overengineered, built to withstand a sixty-foot free fall. They could take the extra strain.
Green across the board. He unlocked the switch that would began the countdown on lifeboat number one, opened the cover. Inside, the little red breaker-lever glowed with fresh paint. This was a hell of a lot simpler than in the old days, when a lifeboat had to be lowered on davits, swinging crazily in the wind and roll of the ship. Now all you had to do was press a lever; the boat was released from its arrestors, slid down the rails, and fell sixty feet to land, nose first, in the sea. A few moments later it bobbed to the surface and continued on, driving away from the ship. They’d been through the drill many times: drop to recovery took all of six seconds.
“You read, Bruce?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Hang on. I’m releasing the switch.”
He pulled the red lever.
A woman’s voice sounded from a speaker mounted overhead. “Lifeboat number one launching in fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. Nine, eight . . .”
The voice echoed in the metal-walled half deck. The countdown ran out; there was a loudclunk as the steel arrestors disengaged. The boat slid forward on the greased rails, nosed off the end into open space, and Liu leaned over the side to watch it fall, as gracefully as a diver, toward the churning sea.
It struck with a tremendous eruption of spray, much larger than anything Liu had seen during the drills: a geyser that rose forty, fifty feet, swept backward in ragged petals by the tearing wind. The VHF cha
But instead of plunging straight into the water and disappearing, the lifeboat’s forward motion, combined with the added speed of the ship, pitchpoled it sideways, like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond, and it struck the ocean a second time full force along its length, with another eruption of spray that buried the orange boat in boiling water. And then it began to resurface, sluggishly, the Day-Glo hull brightening as it shed green water. The static on the VHF abruptly died into silence.
The woman—Emily Dahlberg—caught her breath, averted her eyes.
Liu stared at the lifeboat, which was already rapidly falling astern. He seemed to be seeing the boat from a strange angle. But no, that wasn’t it: the lifeboat’s profile had changed—the hull was misshapen. Orange and white flecks were detaching themselves from the hull, and a rush of air along a seam blew a line of spray toward the sky.
With a sick feeling Liu realized the hull had been breached, split lengthwise like a rotten melon, and was now spilling its guts.
“Jesus . . .” he heard Crowley murmur next to him. “Oh, Jesus . . .”
He stared in horror at the stoved-in lifeboat. It wasn’t righting itself; it was wallowing sideways, subsiding back in the water, the engine screw uselessly churning the surface, leaving a trail of oil and debris as it fell astern and began to fade away in the gray, storm-tossed seas.
Liu grabbed the VHF and pressed the transmit button. “Bruce! Welch! This is Liu! Respond!
Bruce!”
But there was no answer—as Liu knew there wouldn’t be.
67
ON THE AUXILIARY BRIDGE, LESEUR WAS FACING A TORRENT OF questions.
“The lifeboats!” an officer cried over the others. “What’s happening with the lifeboats?”
LeSeur shook his head. “No word yet. I’m still waiting to hear from Liu and Crowley.”
The chief radio officer spoke up. “I’ve got the
Grenfell
on cha
LeSeur looked at him. “Fax him on the SSB fax to switch to cha